A few reasons to love the Big Bang:

— Time turns edgy again.

— The steady state model proved unsustainable — the most exquisite irony ever?

— Physical theories now have cosmic dates. For instance, the still-elusive unifying theory of quantum gravitation corresponds to the Planck Epoch, when the universe was still far smaller than an atomic nucleus, compelling gravity to operate at the quantum scale. Similarly, particle accelerator technology becomes deep time regression.

— The Planck Epoch is really wild: “During the Planck era, the Universe can be best described as a quantum foam of 10 dimensions containing Planck length sized black holes continuously being created and annihilated with no cause or effect. In other words, try not to think about this era in normal terms.”

— The void animates. Sten Odenwald quotes UCSB physicist Frank Wilczek: “The reason that there is something instead of nothing is that nothing is unstable”.

There is a ‘problem’ that has been nagging at me for a long time – which is that there hasn’t been a long time. It’s Saturday, with no one around, or getting drunk, or something, so I’ll run it past you. Cosmology seems oddly childish.

An analogy might help. Among all the reasons for super-sophisticated atheistic materialists to deride Abrahamic creationists, the most arithmetically impressive is the whole James Ussher 4004 BC thing. The argument is familiar to everyone: 6,027 years — Ha!

Creationism is a topic for another time. The point for now is just: 13.7 billion years – Ha! Perhaps this cosmological consensus estimate for the age of the universe is true. I’m certainly not going to pit my carefully-rationed expertise in cosmo-physics against it. But it’s a stupidly short amount of time. If this is reality, the joke’s on us. Between Ussher’s mid-17^th century estimate and (say) Hawking’s late 20^th century one, the difference is just six orders of magnitude. It’s scarcely worth getting out of bed for. Or the crib.

For anyone steeped in Hindu Cosmology – which locates us 1.56 x 10^14 years into the current Age of Brahma – or Lovecraftian metaphysics, with its vaguer but abysmally extended eons, the quantity of elapsed cosmic time, according to the common understanding of our present scientific establishment, is cause for claustrophobia. Looking backward, we are sealed in a small room, with the wall of the original singularity pressed right up against us. (Looking forward, things are quite different, and we will get to that.)

There are at least three ways in which the bizarre youthfulness of the universe might be imagined:

1. Consider first the disconcerting lack of proportion between space and time. The universe contains roughly 100 billion galaxies, each a swirl of 100 billion stars. That makes Sol one of 10^22 stars in the cosmos, but it has lasted for something like a third of the life of the universe. Decompose the solar system and the discrepancy only becomes more extreme. The sun accounts for 99.86% of the system’s mass, and the gas giants incorporate 99% of the remainder, yet the age of the earth is only fractionally less than that of the sun. Earth is a cosmic time hog. In space it is next to nothing, but in time it extends back through a substantial proportion of the Stelliferous Era, so close to the origin of the universe that it is belongs to the very earliest generations of planetary bodies. Beyond it stretch incomprehensible immensities, but before it there is next to nothing.

2. Compared to the intensity of time (backward) extension is of vanishing insignificance. The unit of Planck time – corresponding to the passage of a photon across a Planck length — is about 5.4 x 10^-44 seconds. If there is a true instant, that is it. A year consists of less the 3.2 x 10^7 seconds, so cosmological consensus estimates that there have been approximately 432 339 120 000 000 000 seconds since the Big Bang, which for our purposes can be satisfactorily rounded to 4.3 x 10^17. The difference between a second and the age of the universe is smaller that that between a second and a Planck Time tick by nearly 27 orders of magnitude. In other words, if a Planck Time-sensitive questioner asked “When did the Big Bang happen?” and you answered “Just now” — in clock time — you’d be almost exactly right. If you had been asked to identify a particular star from among the entire stellar population of the universe, and you picked it out correctly, your accuracy would still be hazier by 5 orders of magnitude. Quite obviously, there haven’t been enough seconds since the Big Bang to add up to a serious number – less than one for every 10,000 stars in the universe.

3. Isotropy gets violated by time orientation like a Detroit muni-bond investor. In a universe dominated by dark energy – like ours – expansion lasts forever. The Stelliferous Era is predicted to last for roughly 100 trillion years, which is over 7,000 times the present age of the universe. Even the most pessimistic interpretation of the Anthropic Principle, therefore, places us only a fractional distance from the beginning of time. The Degenerate Era, post-dating star-formation, then extends out to 10^40 years, by the end of which time all baryonic matter will have decayed, and even the most radically advanced forms of cosmic intelligence will have found existence becoming seriously challenging. Black holes then dominate out to 10^60 years, after which the Dark Era begins, lasting a long time. (Decimal exponents become unwieldy for these magnitudes, making more elaborate modes of arithmetical notation expedient. We need not pursue it further.) The take-away: the principle of Isotropy holds that we should not find ourselves anywhere special in the universe, and yet we do – right at the beginning. More implausibly still, we are located at the very beginning of an infinity (although anthropic selection might crop this down to merely preposterous improbability).

Intuitively, this is all horribly wrong, although intuitions have no credible authority, and certainly provide no grounds for contesting rigorously assembled scientific narratives.  Possibly — I should concede most probably — time is simply ridiculous, not to say profoundly insulting. We find ourselves glued to the very edge of the Big Bang, as close to neo-natal as it is arithmetically possible to be.

That’s odd, isn’t it?

ADDED: Numerical escalation from John Derbyshire.

ADDED: Alrenous has a different Big Bang issue.

… even just the solar system. ‘Awesome’ is a word destroyed by casual over-use, but I’m groping for an alternative right now, and not finding it. This has to be one of the best uses of a website out there — meaning: really out there.

(Via.)

Natural cycles being what they are, there’s bound to be another mini-Ice Age (of the Maunder Minimum-type) eventually, and quite possibly soon. The implications for climate science, climate politics, and much beyond, are huge. Clean data on systemic effects are not accessible within history. That means all vulgar attempts to read out the effects of anthropic interventions from the historical record are doomed to fail, until perfect understanding of confounding rhythms are fully understood — basically, indefinitely. (Throw in chaos theory and other sources of epistemological pessimism here.) No one seriously thinks that a globally-coordinated ‘precautionary’ policy stance viz anthropogenic warming is constructible during a mini-Ice Age (do they?).

The consequence: Climate politics could — in reality — be a fairly remote science fiction scenario. By the time its opportunity comes around, far more will have been decided than is being allowed for.

ADDED:

Global warming is settled science, so I'm supposed to ignore this, right? But is there a good reason why? http://t.co/SCbhqYwE7M

— Charles Murray (@charlesmurray) July 13, 2015

In the Author’s Note to Peter Hessler’s Oracle Bones (2006, subtitled ‘A Journey Between China’s Past and Present’), it is explained that:

The main chapters of this book are arranged chronologically, but the short sections labeled ‘artifacts’ are not. They reflect a deeper sense of time — the ways in which people make sense of history after it has receded farther into the past.

As time advances, the past recedes. Modernity, however, is more than that. It is the excavation of the past through acceleration into the future, a process of discovery, reclamation, and dilation, through which the past is explosively expanded. As Hessler realizes, the Oracle Bones, indissolubly binding the recovery of China’s deep history to its activation of modernity, provide an exemplary illustration of this.

Yet modernity, as consolidated upon European foundations, has been dismissive of Chinese history, seeing only scale without pattern:

In the traditional view of the Chinese past, there is no equivalent of the fall of Rome, no Renaissance, no Enlightenment. Instead, emperor succeeds emperor, and dynasty follows dynasty. History as wallpaper.

In a Nanjing museum gift shop, Hessler glimpses an alternative model:

At one Nanjing museum, I bought a poster labeled OUTLINE OF ANCIENT CHINESE HISTORY. The poster featured a timeline twisted into the shape of a spiral. Everything started in the center, at a tiny point identified as ‘Yuanmou Ape-man.’  After Yuanmou Ape-man (approximately 1.7 million years ago), the timeline passed through Peking Man and then made an abrupt turn. By the Xia dynasty, the spiral had completed one full circle. The Shang and the Zhou dynasties wrapped up a second revolution. The spiral got bigger with each turn, as if picking up speed. Whenever something ended — a dynasty, a warring state — the spiral was marked with a line and a black X, and then something new took its place. There weren’t any branches or dead ends. From Yuanmou Ape-man, it took three turns of the spiral to reach the revolution of 1911, where the timeline finally broke the cycle, straightened out, and pointed directly up and off the page.

Whether folding the historical time line, or expanding a snail shell, the spiral synthesizes repetition and growth. It describes a cyclic escalation that escapes — or precedes — the antagonism between tradition and progress, elucidating restoration as something other than a simple return.

This is a matter of ineluctable importance, because the history of modernity is rapidly becoming Chinese, and Chinese history is not meandering ‘wallpaper’ but Confucian Restoration, conforming to three great waves, each a turn of the spiral, or Gyre. Following China’s classical era, and the Song Dynasty rebirth of native philosophical tradition, the third Confucian epoch, or second Confucian Restoration, is underway today, coinciding exactly with the renaissance of Global Modernity (as ‘Modernity 2.0’). As future and past evolve — or involve — together, the time-spiral is our guide.

E. Antony Gray triggered a Twitter storm about Greer and the tension between cyclic-repetitive and linear-progressive time. (I’ve no idea how to link the discussion that subsequently erupted.) Since the integration, or diagonal, between cycle and flight is not hard to find, it provides the perfect opportunity for a time-spiral T-shirt:

Cyclic Escalation

If this looks like the abstract cybergothic shape of NRx, it is only to be expected.

Some unusually brilliant Druidic prophecy from John Michael Greer:

Whether the crisis is contained by federal loan guarantees and bank nationalizations that keep farms, factories, and stores supplied with the credit they need, by the repudiation of debts and the issuance of a new currency, by martial law and the government seizure of unused acreage, or by ordinary citizens cobbling together new systems of exchange in a hurry, as happened in Argentina, Russia, and other places where the economy suddenly went to pieces, the crisis will be contained.  The negative feedback here is provided by the simple facts that people are willing to do almost anything to put food on the table, governments are willing to do even more to stay in power, and in hundreds of previous crises, their actions have proven more than sufficient to stop the positive feedback loops of economic crisis in their tracks, and stabilize the situation at some level.

None of this means the crisis will be easy to get through, nor does it mean that the world that emerges once the rubble stops bouncing and the dust settles will be anything like as prosperous, as comfortable, or as familiar as the one we have today. That’s true of all three of the situations I’ve sketched out in this post. While the next round of crisis along the arc of industrial civilization’s decline and fall will likely be over by 2070 of so, living through the interval between then and now will probably have more than a little in common with living through the First World War, the waves of political and social crises that followed it, the Great Depression, and the rise of fascism, followed by the Second World War and its aftermath—and this time the United States is unlikely to be sheltered from the worst impacts of crisis, as it was between 1914 and 1954. [Read the whole thing]

(Combining large-scale historical vision, cybernetic theory, and extraordinary native intelligence, Greer is one of the most important voices on the reality-relevant blogosphere. His model of Catabolic Collapse, in particular, is an indispensable reference. Outside in will be visiting his ideas repeatedly over the next few weeks.)

Upon learning that America has an Arch-Druid, it would be only natural to make some assumptions about his beliefs, and cautious guesses would probably be right. The commitments of a religion that avoid appeal to the supernatural, one might expect, would be characteristically down-to-earth, ecological, conservative (in the determinedly lower-case and old-fashioned sense), practical, and empirical. At its most intellectually abstract, and also most (quietly) mystical, druidism would accept the ultimate complicity of all reality with a pattern of change that is at once sensible and insurmountable, multi-leveled, subtle, and all-enveloping: the cycle.

John Michael Greer, author of the Arch-Druid Report, eschews spiritual obscurity, at least in public. His persona as a blogger is that of a calm, lucid, and exceptionally insightful cycle theorist. In the strongest and most ineluctable sense, cyclicity is the norm, from which nothing truly, or sustainably, departs. A cultural formation that loses this druidic grounding, by attaching itself to a setting which would break the cycle, thereby destines itself to a fall, or reversal of fortune – expressing the inevitable reversion to sustainability within a greater wheel of nature and history. Balance is less a moral imperative than a cosmic necessity, and since sustainability cannot be avoided, it can only also be advised.

As an analytical method, druidism is a kind of cybernetics, reflecting the mainstream orientation of the discipline. Negative feedback, which adjusts towards stability, fetches back deviations, to produce normal cycles. Perturbations are canceled within natural rhythms. Destabilizing, self-accentuating, positive feedback, in contrast, incarnates the unnatural, and is thus – from a certain perspective – unreal. Self-reinforcing processes accelerate to a crisis, and then collapse, describing a wave, or fluctuation, at a greater scale. What seems like an irrecoverable deviation has its counterpart within a larger whole, matching it exactly in one-sidedness, or violence, and providing the complementary reversion that restores equilibrium. A broken cycle is part of a more encompassing rhythm, partially perceived. Druidic naturalism insists that everything is eventually fetched back, because there is nowhere ‘else’ to flee. The law of the earth is ultimately inviolable:

… positive feedback [is] extremely rare in the real world, because systems with positive feedback promptly destroy themselves — imagine a thermostat that responded to rising temperatures by heating things up further until the house burns down. Negative feedback, by contrast, is everywhere.

At the largest social scale, pathological deviations, and their reversions, are exemplified by the rise and fall of civilizations. Historical cycle theorists, such as Spengler and Toynbee, capture the recurrent pattern in its essentials. Cultures and all of their component parts, including historiography itself, are enveloped and directed by these great rhythms:

Every literate urban society, Spengler argued, followed the same trajectory from an original folk religion rich in myths, through the rise of intellectual theology, the birth of rationalism, the gradual dissolution of the religious worldview into rational materialism, and then the gradual disintegration of rational materialism into a radical skepticism that ends by dissolving itself; thereafter ethical philosophies for the intellectuals and resurgent folk religion for the masses provide the enduring themes for the civilization to come.

Such patterns offer the material for what Greer calls ‘morphology’ which, on the model (especially) of 18th and 19th century biology, extracts regular, comparable shapes from the confusion of varied particulars. Among the objects of morphological investigation are deep cultural structures, inextricable from religious ideas (in the widest sense), which pre-reflectively organize the experience of historical time. Globalized Occidental civilization (“modern industrial culture”), Greer argues, is characterized by two dominant time shapes, at once twinned and aligned, which resonate with an unsustainable, positive-feedback dynamic in their pathological denial of balance, or eventual reversion.

Before examining these twinned shapes of modern time, some broader context can generate ambient illumination. Greer introduces a variety of time shapes from non-industrial cultures (and ecologies), including the changeless ‘dream time’ of hunter-gatherer societies, and the great cycles of pre-modern Chinese tradition. Indeed, his sketch of the classical Chinese time-shape appears oddly, even fetchingly, druidic:

The basic theory of the Chinese science of time is that events are guided by many different cycles, some faster and some slower, some influencing one dimension of human life and some shaping another.  The cycle of the seasons was one of these; the cycle of human life was another; the cycle of the rise and fall of dynasties was a third; there were many more, each with its own period and typical sequence of events. Just as no two years had exactly the same weather on exactly the same days, no two repetitions of any other cycle were identical, but common patterns allowed the events of one repetition to be more or less predicted by a sufficiently broad knowledge of earlier examples.  On a much broader scale, all cycles of every kind could be understood as expressions of a single abstract pattern of cyclic change, which was explored in the classic Chinese textbook of time theory, the I Ching — in English, the Book of Change.

The most jarring contrast with the progressive model of time, however, is found much closer to it, both in cultural proximity and obvious ecological complementarity. It is laid out by Hesiod in his Works and Days, where it is articulated as a grinding stepwise decline through successive ages, each determined by its deterioration relative to the age before.

Hesiod’s abnormality – or ours – emerges starkly from an overlap. As modern historiography progresses, expanding its purchase ever more deeply into archeology and paleo-anthropology, it discovers ancient societies ‘rising’ from the new stone age (‘neolithic’) to the bronze age, and then later, with the advance of metallurgy, entering the iron age, with improved weapons and tools. The passage from bronze to iron is an obvious leap forward, corresponding to a basic threshold of cultural maturation, locked in to the history of the world by a progressive technological ratchet. How disconcerting, then, to find this same sequence repeated by Hesiod, but with inverse sign, in a degenerative series of ages — Golden, Silver, Bronze, and Iron – that proceed through increments of coarsening, from the most noble metal, to the most base.

From our deeply-entrenched, progressive perspective, any historical meta-narrative structured by relentless decline appears exotically strange. The same does not hold within Greer’s ecological framework, which couples deviations to reversions within long cycles, so that a downward slope is no more abnormal than a persistent incline. Our historical optimism finds itself ecologically relativized by a story that has no less confidence in its fears than we have in our long-consolidated hopes. The explanatory background that Greer supplies – themed by soil erosion — has sufficient directionality to match, and to carry, Hesiod’s shape of time:

Two thousand years before Hesiod, prehistoric Greece had been the home of a lively assortment of village cultures making the slow transition from polished stone tools to bronze. On that foundation more complex societies rose, borrowing heavily from contemporary high cultures in the Middle East, and culminating in the monumental architecture and literate palace bureaucracies of the Mycenean age. Those of my readers who have some sense of the rhythms of history will already know what followed: too much clearcutting and intensive farming of the fragile Greek soils, made worse by the importation of farming methods better suited to flat Mesopotamian valleys than easily eroded Greek hills, triggered an ecological crisis; most of the topsoil of Mycenean Greece ended up at the bottom of the Aegean Sea, where it can still be found in core samples; warfare, migration, and population collapse followed in the usual manner, as Mycenean society stumbled down the curve of its own Long Descent.

Greer’s readers have been prepared to recognize “its own” as a pointer to our own – another “Long Descent” anticipated by an ecological grounding pattern, this time set by the energy-availability curve of Peak Oil. This forecast is a topic for another occasion. For now, our concern is more abstract, indifferent to the specific mechanism of civilizational limitation, and attentive solely to Greer’s claim that the denial of historical cyclicity is a form of unwarranted exceptionalism,  founded materially in an ecological boost-phase, and reasonably encapsulated in the notorious bubble slogan this time it’s different:

There’s a wry amusement to be had by thinking through the implications of this constantly repeated claim. If our society was in fact shaking off the burdens of the past and breaking new ground with every minute that goes by, as believers in progress like to claim, wouldn’t it be more likely that the theory of historical cycles would be challenged each time it appears with dazzlingly new, innovative responses that no one had ever imagined before?  Instead, in an irony Nietzsche would have relished, the claim that history can’t repeat itself endlessly repeats itself, in what amounts to an eternal return of the insistence that there is no eternal return. What’s more, those who claim that it’s different this time seem blissfully unaware that anyone has made the same claim before them, and if this is pointed out to them, they insist—often with quite some heat—that what they’re saying has nothing whatsoever to do with all the other times the same argument was used to make the same point down through the years.

It bears repeating that the belief in progress, and the equal and opposite belief in apocalypse, are narratives about the unknowable. Both claim that the past has nothing to say about the future, that something is about to happen that has never happened before and that can’t be judged on the basis of any previous event.

Neither progress nor apocalypse, Greer contends, are time-shapes well-suited to the realistic evaluation of their ends. [More on that next]

In the first part of this series, we introduced John Michael Greer’s ‘druidic’ framework for the evaluation of cultural ‘time shapes’ – based on a presumption of dominant cyclicity, according to which any prolonged deviation or unbalanced process is exposed as an unsustainable exception. Within a sufficiently expansive great cycle, any continuous progressive trend is complemented by a proportionate regression (and, of course, inversely). The cyclic assumption marks out each and every image of absolute progress as illusory. In this way, the cycle, when applied to any particular figure of time, describes an enveloping structure that provides pointed critical perspective. (Criticism of the cyclic assumption itself — or ‘in turn’ — is best delayed until Greer’s most significant positive results have been sketched.)

The presently-dominant global civilization – when apprehended at a level of extreme (ecological) abstraction – is the fossil-fuel burning runaway spurt that Greer calls “modern industrial culture.” Central to this culture is an expectation of growth, founded in an unsustainable ecological process, and expressed through distinctive time shapes. The plural here is essential, because Greer’s complete ‘morphological’ description of modern time unfolds within a tripartite system of classification.

The first time shape is mostly occluded. This is the cyclic model that organizes Greer’s thinking, serving both as a pivot and as an enveloping frame. The cyclical time-conception defines a ‘middle way’ that exposes abnormality and excess through contrast, and also completes a holistic comprehension, contextualizing partiality or bias. It functions within Greer’s analysis as an intellectual tool, or workshop, more than a distinct object of investigation. Given its ‘transcendental’ status within the druidic order of apprehension, the cycle is not limited to a moment of historical origination, or associated with the name of a particular cultural authority.

The second time shape is not intrinsically modern, but is rather the living ancestor, or vital inheritance, of the culture that would eventually assert the terms of global modernity. Of the world’s numerous pre-modern time shapes, it is the one that has been universalized by its lineal descendents. Greer identifies it primarily with Augustine of Hippo, and he assigns it a specific birthday: AD 413.

Greer argues (conventionally), that the collapse of the Christian Empire under barbarian onslaught threatened the new faith with a crisis of legitimacy, leading Augustine to the radical conclusion that: “Ordinary history … has no moral order or meaning.”

The place of moral order and meaning in time is found instead in sacred history, which has a distinctive linear shape of its own. That shape begins in perfection, in the Garden of Eden; disaster intervenes, in the form of original sin, and humanity tumbles down into the fallen world. From that point on, there are two histories of the world, one sacred and one secular. The secular history is the long and pointless tale of stupidity, violence and suffering that fills the history books; the sacred history is the story of God’s dealings with a small minority of human beings — the patriarchs, the Jewish people, the apostles, the Christian church — who are assigned certain roles in a preexisting narrative. Eventually the fallen world will be obliterated, most of its inhabitants will be condemned to a divine boot in the face forever, and those few who happen to be on the right side will be restored to Eden’s perfection, at which point the story ends.

In formulating this story, Augustine gave “the Western world what would be, for the next millennium or so, its definitive shape of time.” Furthermore, even after the emergence of an alternative, this foundational cultural narrative would remain in reserve, constantly available as a recourse should its successor falter, betray the interests of disaffected groups, or accumulate signs of crisis. The Western tradition, when conceived through its ancestral time shape, would be perpetuated as an undrained reservoir of apocalyptic temptation. The ecological critique of modernity, Greer observes, is as fully-saturated with this apocalyptic narrative as any other articulation of social dissent.

Within modernity proper, however, the Augustinian time shape has ceased to be mainstream. Once again, Greer is not reluctant to reach for a name and a (rough) date, that of the twelfth century Italian mystic “Joachim of Flores … [who] had an impact on the future as significant as Augustine’s: he’s the person who kicked down the barrier between sacred and secular history that Augustine put so much effort into building, and created the shape of time that the cultural mainstream occupies to this day.”

To Joachim, sacred history was not limited to a paradise before time, a paradise after it, and the thread of the righteous remnant and the redeeming doctrine linking the two.  He saw sacred history unfolding all around him in the events of his own time. His vision divided all of history into three great ages, governed by the three persons of the Christian trinity: the Age of Law governed by the Father, which ran from the Fall to the crucifixion of Jesus; the Age of Love governed by the Son, which ran from the crucifixion to the year 1260; and the Age of Liberty governed by the Holy Spirit, which would run from 1260 to the end of the world.

What made Joachim’s vision different from any of the visionary histories that came before it — and there were plenty of those in the Middle Ages — was that it was a story of progress.

Not only does the Joachimite three-stage narrative of progress introduce the idea of uncompensated advance, it also legitimates a trend to secularization, as the institutional structures appropriate to the patriarchal and filial epochs are dissolved in the new age of revolutionary liberty. Unsurprisingly, radical intellectuals and movements seized upon this schema as a blueprint for the dispossession of the Old Order, ensuring its general popularization. As modernity was serially ‘revolutionized’ it became ever more Joachimite in its basic assumptions, until progress had been installed as a dominant ‘civil religion‘. Eventually, the progressive idea had been normalized to the point of near-total invisibility.

With the outlining of the Augustinian and Joachimite ‘visions’, Greer’s classification of modern time shapes approaches completeness. The entire argument, when schematically reviewed, can be decomposed into a number of distinct and informative claims:
(a) The culture of modern global civilization is dominated by exactly two principal time shapes.
(b) These time shapes are in certain respects culturally arbitrary, arising in specific times and places, without any original logical inter-dependency, and inflected by the concerns of a particular religious tradition.
(c) This arbitrariness is further confirmed by the morphological richness each time shape reveals, a feature that supports confident identification and classification of superficially differentiated variants.
(d) Despite the absence of logical necessity, when historically assembled into a mature, dyadic system, the combined Augustinian-Joachimite duality evidences a significant measure of reciprocal order (or effective ‘dialectical unity’) and a near exhaustive purchase upon the modern cultural imagination — conformity and dissent.
(e) The complementarity of the dyad approximately corresponds to symmetrical judgments of (Joachimite) affirmation and (Augustinian) negation of a prevailing historical trend.
(f) Regardless of their manifest power of captivation, the Augustinian-Joachimite dyad has a limit, best described by the cyclic time model from which each side of the duality diverges.

[Next: critical appraisal]

When describing the thinking of John Michael Greer as ‘druidic’ – as this series has cheerfully done – the adjective has been primarily philosophical in direction. It has been used only to indicate that an identifiable, and remarkably coherent, presupposition about the governing nature of time anchors Greer’s particular analyses, which draw out the implications of an unsurpassable cosmic cyclicity, and apply them deftly to a wide variety of concrete problems. ‘Druid’ and ‘radical cycle theorist’ have been treated as roughly equivalent terms.

It is worth noting at this point, however, that Greer is not only conceptually druidic. He is a public proponent of Druidism in a far richer, culturally-elaborate sense, which includes service “as presiding officer — Grand Archdruid is the official title — of the Ancient Order of Druids in America (AODA), a Druid order founded in 1912.” This vocation slants his perspective in important (and productive) ways. Our concerns here, tightly focused on the question of time, are able to extract considerable intellectual nourishment from a digression into this thick druidism.

Like other forms of occult Occidental religion, Druidry has an attachment to the deep past that is not tacit and traditional, but overt, modern, and creative. Greer admits readily – even gleefully – that his ‘Ancient Order’ is not in fact ancient at all, but instead belongs to a project of restoration – and actually reconstruction – that dates back no further than the mid-17^th century. From its inception, it was bound to a lost past and to inextinguishable doubts about its own authenticity. Greer only very rarely uses his Archdruid Report platform to discuss druidism explicitly. On the first occasion when he does so, his reflections are triggered by the question of a young boy: Are you a real Druid?

It’s not an easy question to answer. The original Druids, the priests and wizards of the ancient Celts, went extinct more than a thousand years ago, and all their beliefs, practices, and teachings went with them.

More specifically, he explains:

Who were the Druids? The honest answer is that we really don’t know. Most of what was written about them in ancient times vanished forever when the Roman Empire collapsed. Every surviving text written about the Druids while they still existed, put together, add up to ten pages or so in English translation. … Druids in training memorized many lines of verse, since it was forbidden to set down their teachings in writing. … Julius Caesar, whose book on the Roman conquest of Gaul is the most detailed source on the Druids, noted that Druidic teachings were thought to come from Britain originally, while a Greek scholar claimed that the Druids got their lore from the Greek philosopher Pythagoras; no other writer refers to the subject. … archeologists and historians were able to prove conclusively that the Druidry of the Revival was a modern spiritual movement, not an ancient one.

Modern druidry is a revival, which is to say that it originates through identification with something that is dead. Its modernity is stretched and activated, to become more than mere succession, and more even than self-conscious, differentiated succession — or ‘advance’. The discontinuity that defines ‘the Revival’ cannot be reduced to a transition, however radical. Instead, it corresponds to an uncertain reaching back, through the still-living past and beyond, towards a lost beginning. In this way it initiates a process — and a new tradition — that cannot easily be resolved into distinct elements of invention and re-animation. In its quest for ancient origins, it relocates the present within an expanded comprehension of historical time. This complex, quasi-paradoxical cultural undertaking, is at once typically modern, and anti-modern. By distancing itself from passive accommodation to its historical moment, it epitomizes this same moment in its concrete historical reality — as a revolt against simple continuity. It represents a dramatic neo-traditionalism, of an Occidental type.

The time-traveler tends to produce — or become — a double, and the modern Druid is no exception. Something ‘ancient’ is returned to life, so that re-animator and re-animated co-exist in a folded present, cross-identified, and ambiguously co-original, or coincidental. Do the Druids of the Revival ‘still’ believe the archaic wisdom of cyclicity, now rediscovered, or do they project it back onto the blank screen of an erased antiquity? Who is the copy here? We are returned, inexorably, to a problem of identification (“Are you a real Druid?“), model and derivation, originality and repetition. A search for reality has become inextricable from an exercise in duplicity, twisted into a reflective or introspective circle, and spun out into an investigation of time.

As this perplexity develops, the term ‘Druid Revival’ comes to seem like something more than an arbitrary conjunction. Its two words are not merely joined, but doubled, as an echo of time disturbance. Each points independently towards a pre-implanted pattern of return, with the cycle already registered on both sides. Greer traces the ‘real roots’ of this doubling to a discontinuous connection:

Some modern Druid groups in the 19th and early 20th centuries, to their lasting discredit, claimed direct connections to the ancient Celtic Druids they didn’t have. The real roots of the modern Druid movement go in a different direction: to the first stages of the Industrial Revolution in early 18th century Britain, and the Hobson’s choice between dogmatic religion and materialist science, the two victors in the reality wars of the late Renaissance. Plenty of people sought a third option that embraced nature and spirit alike, and some of them found inspiration in the scraps of classical writing, medieval legend, and Celtic folklore that referred to the ancient Druids.

“Historians call the result the Druid Revival,” he continues, as if determined to separate this twin term from anything that modern druidry first said about itself. He recognizes, perhaps, that druidism is the philosophy (or religion) of revival — or of the full ‘ecological’ cycle through life and death — so that to draw upon this word (‘revival’) threatens to represent the return of druidic thinking through itself, in a closed circle of self-confirmation, persuasive only to those of prior druidic (or, more narrowly, cycle-theoretical) inclination. Better, then, that ‘historians’ seal this circle, from outside, and thereby demonstrate its real coincidence, or simple reality. The Revival is noticed as historical fact, before it is cycled back into druidic intelligence, as a doctrinal expectation.

Each year is a cyclical time unit of death and revival, and in this it is a primordial teacher, in a way that no scripture could ever be. That, at least, is the folk pagan understanding that Druid Revival restores to ritualistic primacy, and adopts as its guiding cognitive model. Its own revival, therefore, is ‘only natural’, or self-explanatory.

To bring thinking into compliance with the great cycles is immediately to participate in a speculative super-tradition, sustained by a structure of ideas and apprehension that cannot but return. In the thought of the cycle there is already implied a non-originality, binding the thinker, across time, to all those who necessarily understand the way things have to happen again. What, then, is ancient origin, and what revival? When would one look for a ‘real Druid’?

[This digression has a little further to stray, along a more concrete path, before critical distance is restored.]

Anyone who isn’t yet reading The Archdruid Report really ought to be. John Michael Greer is quite simply one of the most brilliant writers in existence, and even when he’s wrong, he’s importantly wrong. His perspective is coherent, learned, and uncaged by the assumptions of progressivism. Above all, his understanding of what it means to find history informative is unsurpassed. (Over at the Other Place, there’s an unfinished Greer series that badly requires attention, with the first three installments here, here, and here.)

When escalated to the extreme, the progressive conclusion is that history can teach us nothing. Innovation is by its very nature unprecedented, and insofar as it manifests improvement, it humbles its precursors. The past is the rude domicile of ignorant barbarity. Insofar as the present still bears its traces, as shameful stigmata, they are mere remains that still have to be overcome. At the limit, the concept of Singularity — a horizon at which all anticipatory knowledge is annulled — seals the progressive intuition.

In its abstract theoretical core, at least, Greer’s Druidic counter-history is radically reactionary (far more unambiguously so than NRx). Its model of time is entirely cyclical, such that past and future are perfectly neutral between ascent and decline. Every attempt to install a gradient of improvement in the dimension of historical time is broken upon the great wheels, which balance every rise with a fall, dissolving innovation in precedent. Novelty is hubristic illusion (an exaggerated correction, in the opinion of this blog).

In his most recent post Greer introduces an intriguing complication:

Arnold Toynbee, whose magisterial writings on history have been a recurring source of inspiration for this blog, has pointed out an intriguing difference between the way civilizations rise and the way they fall. On the way up, he noted, each civilization tends to diverge not merely from its neighbors but from all other civilizations throughout history. […] Once the peak is past and the long road down begins, though, that pattern of divergence shifts into reverse, slowly at first, and then with increasing speed. A curious sort of homogenization takes place: distinctive features are lost, and common patterns emerge in their place. That doesn’t happen all at once, and different cultural forms lose their distinctive outlines at different rates, but the further down the trajectory of decline and fall a civilization proceeds, the more it resembles every other civilization in decline.

The dissymmetry calls out for philosophical investigation, since it suggests a line of synthetic diagonalization between precedent and innovation, cyclicity and escape (which is to say, the NRx or cybergothic line). It would be to stray too far from Greer to follow that now.

Straightforwardly, the claim being made is that forecasting strengthens on the down-slope of civilization. The more a social order fails, the more it sheds its originality, and thus the more accessible it becomes to accurate diagnosis on the basis of historical example. As collapse deepens, it converges with a template, bound ever tighter to a model by its morbidity. Across the peak, an age of prophecy begins — or returns.

The dark irony is delicious almost beyond endurance. The Universal, long proclaimed as the capstone of progress, is realized only as a nadir. The equality of all civilizations is asserted, in reality, as a direct measure of their proximity to death. Among the spreading ruins, the mad echoes of similarity resound deafeningly, as the blasted Cathedral plummets towards its Idea — eternal return of the same.

The word ‘neoreaction’ is a split, productively paradoxical formula, simultaneously referencing two incompatible cultural formations, each corresponding to an abstract model of time. On one side, it is a gateway opening onto techno-libertarian hyper-progressivism, and an order of time structured by irreversible accumulation, self-envelopment, and catastrophe horizon (Singularity). On the other, it opens onto the temporality of reaction and the cycle, where all progress is illusion, and all innovation anticipated. Within NRx, the time of escape and the time of return seek an obscure synthesis, at once unprecedented and primordial, whose cryptic figure is the spiral. (This is the time of the Old Ones and the Outside, from which the shoggoth come.) If NRx thinks itself already lodged articulately in this synthesis, it deludes itself.

From a strictly philosophical perspective, the time of reaction finds no defender more able than Archdruid John Michael Greer. while his specific form of religious traditionalism, his social attitudes, and his eco-political commitments are all profoundly questionable from the standpoint of throne-and altar reaction, his model of time cannot be surpassed in an Old Right direction. Those who would install a prejudice of relentless degeneration in its place, anchored by a revealed religion of recent creation and subsequent continuous fall, only position themselves to the ‘right’ of Greer by making God a revolutionary. If deep time is to be preserved, there can be no archaic authority beyond the cycle.

Why call Greer a reactionary? It is not, after all, a label he would accept for himself. The answer lies in cyclical time, and everything that follows from it: the supremacy of wisdom among human things, the enduring authority of history, the dismissal of modernist pretension as a mere mask for deep historical repetition, an absolute disillusionment with progress, and an adamantine prognosis that — from the peak of fake ‘improvement’ where we find ourselves — a grinding course of decline over coming centuries is an inevitability. The cultural and political decoration can be faulted, but in the fundamental structure of Greer’s thinking, reaction is perfected.

There is a religious consideration to be noted here, as the stepping stone to another point. Once the cyclical counter-assumption is adopted — in a definitive break from modernist ideology — it leads inexorably to an expansion of the time frame. To see the pattern, it is necessary to pan out. An apparent rise is only rendered intelligible by its complementary fall. An event makes sense to the extent that it can be identified as a repetition, through subsumption into a persistent rhythm, which means that to understand it is to pull back from it, into ever wider expanses of history. Recognized precedent is wisdom.

Reaction is thus construed as a critique of modernist myopia. The appearance of innovation derives from a failure to see a larger whole. If something looks new, it is because not enough is being seen.

No surprise, then, to find Greer seize upon an opportunity to discuss The Next Ten Billion Years. At such scales, fluctuations of fortune are fully contextualized, so that no uncompensated progressions remain. After just 1% of this time has passed:

The long glacial epoch that began in the Pleistocene has finally ended, and the Earth is returning to its more usual status as a steamy jungle planet. This latest set of changes proves to be just that little bit too much for humanity. No fewer than 8,639 global civilizations have risen and fallen over the last ten million years, each with its own unique sciences, technologies, arts, literatures, philosophies, and ways of thinking about the cosmos; the shortest-lived lasted for less than a century before blowing itself to smithereens, while the longest-lasting endured for eight millennia before finally winding down.

All that is over now. There are still relict populations of human beings in Antarctica and a few island chains, and another million years will pass before cascading climatic and ecological changes finally push the last of them over the brink into extinction. Meanwhile, in the tropical forests of what is now southern Siberia, the descendants of raccoons who crossed the Bering land bridge during the last great ice age are proliferating rapidly, expanding into empty ecological niches once filled by the larger primates. In another thirty million years or so, their descendants will come down from the trees.

Everything that rises will fall.

Such vastly panned-out perspectives are also relevant to the competitive catastrophe theorizing that is so close to the dead heart of this blog. Any conceivable disaster has an associated time-frame, within which it is no more than a wandering fluctuation. Recovery from deep dysgenic decline requires only a few millennia, extinction of the human species perhaps a few tens of millions of years, full restoration of terrestrial fossil fuel deposits, 100 million years or so. Vicissitudes on the down-side scarcely register as tremors in the meanderings of geological time.

There is more to time-scales than more time. Whatever else anthropomorphism is — and it is a lot of other things — it is a scale of time. To be human is to be situated, distinctively, within a spectrum of frequencies. In our wavelength zone, a second is a short time, and a century is long. These lower and upper bounds of significant duration correspond respectively to the biophysics of mammalian motility and to the outer-limits of mortal plans. The cosmic arbitrariness of this scalar time region is very easy to see.

The digital tick of time in our universe is set by the passage of a photon across a Planck-length (in a vacuum), approximately 5.4 x 10^-44 seconds. This is not a number readily intuited. A comparison to the (mere) 4.3 x 10^17 seconds that have so far lapsed during the entire history of the universe perhaps provides some vague sense. (Anthropomorphic time-scale bias is at least roughly as blinding to minuscule durations as to enormous ones.)

The upper limits of the cosmic time-scale are harder to identify. Speculative cosmological models predict the evolution of the Universe out to 10^60 years or more, when the last of the black holes have evaporated. The Stelliferous Era (in which new stars are born) is expected to last for only 100 trillion (10^14) years, out to approximately 7,000 times the present age of the universe. (If the stelliferous universe were analogized to a human being with a one-century life-expectancy, it would presently be an infant, just entering its sixth post-natal day, with 987 billion years to wait until its anthropomorphic first birthday).

Beyond the human time scale lie immensities, and intensities. The latter are especially susceptible to neglect. When — over half a century ago — Richard Feynman anticipated nano-engineering with the words [there’s] “Plenty of Room at the Bottom” he opened prospects of time involution, as well as miniaturization in space. A process migrating in the direction of the incomprehensibly distant Planck limit makes time for itself, in a way quite different from any endurance in temporal extension. Consider ‘now’ to be a second, as it is approximately at the anthropomorphic scale, and its inner durations are potentially near-limitless — vastly exceeding all the time the human species could make available to itself even by persisting to the death of the universe’s last star. A femto-scale intelligence system could explore the rise and fall of entire biological phyla, in detail, in a period so minuscule it would entirely escape human apprehension as sub-momentary, or subliminal. The ultimate eons are less ahead than within.

Greer envisages no escape from the anthropomorphic bandwidth of time. Within his far-future speculation, each new intelligent species that arises is implicitly ‘anthropomorphic’ in this sense. After Earth has died, its particles are strewn among the nearby stars, and incorporated into the body of an alien species:

The creature’s biochemistry, structure, and life cycle have nothing in common with yours, dear reader. Its world, its sensory organs, its mind and its feelings would be utterly alien to you, even if ten billion years didn’t separate you. Nonetheless, it so happens that a few atoms that are currently part of your brain, as you read these words, will also be part of the brain-analogue of the creature on the crag on that distant, not-yet-existing world. Does that fact horrify you, intrigue you, console you, leave you cold?

If coldness is the appropriate response to seeing time still imprisoned, ten billion years from now, then Greer’s vision is chilling. For it to be compelling, however, would take far more.

Though only implicit, it would be grudging to deny Greer credit for the excavation of a crucial reactionary proposition: Nothing will ever break into the vaults of time. This is not an assertion to which Outside in is yet ready to defer.

ADDED: An exercise in extensive time perspective.

Derbyshire at the top of his game:

The whole climate change business is now a zone of hysteria, generating far more noise — mostly of a shrieking kind — than its importance justifies. Opinions about climate change are, as Greg Cochran said, “a mark of tribal membership.” It is also the case, as Greg also said, that “the world is never going to do much about in any event, regardless of the facts.” […] If we did do anything the effect would likely be puny compared to, say, a single major volcanic eruption. Mother Nature laughs at our climate change fretting. […] Consider ice ages for example, like the one we are currently living through.

Ice ages last for tens of millions of years. We don’t know how many there have been. Our planet is 4½ billion years old; we only have clear evidence of ice ages for the last billion years, in which time there have been four ice ages, covering a total of one-third of a billion years. In its “normal” condition — the other two-thirds — the Earth is ice-free all the way up to the poles. […] The present ice age started around 2½ million years ago. Our best guess is that it’ll continue for several million years more. […] Within this ice age there have been ups and downs. The downs are called “glaciations,” the ups — comparatively warm spells, like the one we are currently in — are “interglacials.” […] … The climatic changes here are sensational. At the peak of the last glaciation in 20,000 B.C., the pleasant suburb where I am writing this was buried under an ice sheet several hundred feet thick. It is possible that during one of the earlier ice ages, 700 million years ago, the entire planet was covered with ice, down to the equator.

The dwarfing of scientific concerns to media spin-cycle wavelengths has to be counted among the greatest vulgarizations of our age.

Since there are a number of critical tasks that cannot be advanced prior to straightening out some knotty problems of time topology, UF has added a Templexity page (as a work in progress). It will eventually provide supporting apparatus for an Urbanatomy Electronic product of the same name, due out this fall. What cannot be straightened out, of course won’t be — but something will occur. What holds for macro-history holds no less for micro-history, with the two entangling, rather than resonating.

The cultural pretext for this investigation is Rian Johnson’s Looper, whose very crudities and short-cuts become informative, when approached from the right angle.
The perspective of Templexity is arranged by the postulate: Time-travel is the dramatization of something else.
The firm hypothesis: Shanghai is a time machine.

“You should go to China,” Joe is told by his criminal overseer, Abe. “I’m going to France,” Joe insists stubbornly. Abe responds with what – for us – is the most critical line in the movie: “I’m from the future. You should go to China.” With these words, Looper makes Sino-Futurism its topic. The hyper-modern China Event is too vast to fit simply into time.

Ben Woodard has put up a valuable post that delves into the centrality of time-disturbance to the problems of accelerationism. If the accelerationist intuition is on to something, traffic between these zones of discussion can only thicken.

If you run through the functional specifications of your time machine, and it looks as if it’s going to print bullion, or proliferate doubles, it’s been badly assembled. Time-travel is the dramatization of something else, and you’re still trapped in the simulation.

Forbes on Seth Lloyd:

In Type 1 time travel — the type highlighted in the “Back to the Future” films — all possible pasts and futures in some sense exist simultaneously, says Lloyd. So, that when you go back and change the past in order to enter a different future, your “old” future is in some sense still “there.”

“Our theory of time travel is Type 2,” said Lloyd, “[which means] no matter how hard you try to mess with the past you can’t do it.”

HP Lovecraft fixed the principle.

For the visitors here who are perpetually tortured by the Damn! Where is the tip-jar button? question, less-evil twin has a time-travel book out. (It should be $3.99, but it says $5.99 at my link — which might be a Shanghai-effect.)

UF (2.1) plug here.

If you know anybody teetering on the brink of a psychotic episode, who just needs a slight nudge to plunge over the edge, it would make an ideal present.

Thank you Amazon. Despite some frustrations with the Kindle Direct Publishing interface — which isn’t designed for editorial convenience — the excitement of disintermediation-in-action more than makes up for it. If the self-publishing system reached the stage where writers spent their time on the platform, as a work-space, in the same way they can on a blog today, the horizon of possibility would be pushed out to yet inconceivable distances.

Templexity aims to catalyze a theoretical coagulation where the philosophy of time, contemporary (complex) urbanism, and pulp entertainment media are complicit in an approach to singularity (as a topic, a thing, and a nonlinear knotting of the two (at least)). It proposes that the urban process and the techno-science of time machines is undergoing rapid convergence. (This seems to be a suggestion whose time has come.) Grasp the opportunity offered by computers to visualize what cities really are, and the dynamics of retro-temporalization are graphically displayed.

That being for which the being of time is opened as an exploratory path is the advanced global metropolis. This is a contention already tacked to a cinematic, mass-media revelation, although one formatted by deeply-traditional dramatic criteria, thus systematically, and automatically, encrypted.

Far more on all this later. (If I say too much now, I’m worried I might save you $4.00.)

Nydwracu on Great Awakenings:

La Wik:

Well, things are getting weird. Really weird. …

As for that missing episode, it would be preposterous to advance this (1904) as the apex of a ‘Great Awakening’ in the sense at stake here, but perhaps not such a stretch to think it was picking up on some strange turbulence in the Aethyrs.

History never repeats itself, but it rhymes, runs the suggestive aphorism (falsely?) attributed to Mark Twain.

James Delingpole writes in the Daily Telegraph:

… have you ever tried reading private journals or newspapers from the 1930s? What will surprise you is that right to the very last minute – up to the moment indeed when war actually broke – even the most insightful and informed commentators and writers clung on to the delusion that things would somehow turn out all right. I do hope that history is not about to repeat itself. Unfortunately, the lesson from history is that all too often it does.

There’s quite a lot of this about.

For one theoretical account of how history might rhyme, on an ominous 80-year cycle, there’s a generational model that sets the beat. “Strauss & Howe have established that history can be broken down into 80 to 100 year Saeculums that consist of four turnings: The High, The Awakening, The Unraveling, and the Crisis.” From a philosophical point of view, it seems a little under-powered, but its empirical plausibility rises by the month.

Among Shanghai’s anomalies is a peculiar relation to the 1930s. For the city beyond the International Settlement, the decade slid into disaster when Sino-Japanese hostilities broke out in 1937. Yet the preceding period was not marked by depression, but by exuberant High Modernism. Dates from the 1930s that would in much of the world seem distinctly sinister are displayed on the city’s historic buildings as a mark of Golden Age authenticity. For the paranoid mind, that would slot neatly into the same disturbing rhyme scheme today.

Throughout most of the rich world, economic, political, and cultural decay seemed — retrospectively — to presage the coming cataclysm, as if nothing less could jolt exhausted social systems from their relentless downward slide. Almost everywhere, some version of fascist thinking was seized upon as the antidote to relentlessly gathering malaise. Beneath the surface of the global geostrategic order, shifting tectonic plates accumulated intolerable tension. Degenerate monetary systems came apart into uncontrollable swirls of dysfunctional signs.

Still, it’s entirely possible that there’s nothing to worry about:

Click image to enlarge.

ADDED: “If you hear echoes of the 1930s in the capitulation at Geneva, it’s because the West is being led by the same sort of men, minus the umbrellas.” (I’m hearing echoes of the 1930s just about everywhere.)

As this blog spirals around to its re-starting point, it fetches back the tasks it has yet to advance upon, including the most basic (announced in its sub-title). Why the ‘Decopunk Delta’? Mostly because that’s where time frays.

+ Golden Age Shanghai is unsettled business, and as things surge forward, they turn back.
+ Art Deco is the world’s lost modernity, as everyone senses, without quite knowing how.
+ Art Deco escaped its time, at the time. It is the pre-eminent time-travel relic of the earth.
+ What Art Deco communicates is vivid, yet still unverbalized.
+ Art Deco fascinates again, today, because it is obscurely recognized as the key to the encrypted meaning of world history, and nowhere is this more insistently hinted than in re-opened Shanghai.

– The ‘-punk’ suffix is pulp-code for any cultural time-travel tool undergoing contemporary development.

The two halves of the term ‘Decopunk’ bond through a peculiar quasi-symmetry. Each is time-locked into an identifiable ‘vogue’, while simultaneously making a problem of time, and a topic of history. Art Deco is at once the most evocative characteristic of an epoch — that of high-modernity / capitalism — and a super-historical exploration, extending from the archaic remnants of lost civilizations to flights of science-fictional speculation, drawing the entire cosmos of aesthetic and architectural possibility into itself. The still-proliferating ‘-punk’ suffix, similarly, designates both an eruption of near-contemporary pulp-literary genres, and a method of time pillage, ranging widely across past and future on searches for extractable sets, or techno-cultural styles. Something like an abstract epochality, or historical re-use value, is hunted on each side. When the two connect, original occurrence is swirled into a twin-process recycling machine.

If Decopunk describes a precision-engineered inter-meshing across time, it also marks a tension, or gradient, from the historical to the contemporary, from opulence to squalor, from optimism to pessimism, and from the tangible to the digital. What the past’s virtual present tends to over-estimate, the present’s virtual past tends to undermine, and it is only in the unstable circuit of oscillating valuation that either pole finds its real currency (which is equally that of the other). A euphoric cynicism, honed through spiral detachment from the partial and the actual, melds poly-fractional Decopunk into a single, investigable thing.

***

The conceptual content of the alternative history ‘-punk’ was a central consideration of the (UF1.1) series A Time-Traveler’s Guide to Shanghai (Part 1, Part 2, Part 3). The grungier and more popular — although for our purposes far less exact — term ‘Dieselpunk’ was employed in these pieces, as a place-holder for the emerging problem of time dislocation.

Some of the most prominent cultural-historical questions raised by Shanghai’s Art Deco legacy were briefly indicated in the Urbanatomy guide to the 2010 World Expo, in a short section repeated here:

Tropical Modernity

Cosmopolitanism is an essential trait for any city with aspirations to global status. In itself, however, the cosmopolitan idea is too abstract and empty, or at least indeterminate, to provide adequate guidance into Shanghai’s dominant cultural traditions.

The economic and communicative shrinkage of the world makes modernity, no less than urbanism, inherently cosmopolitan. Since the 1960s, postmodern critics have reconstructed (and ‘deconstructed’) a model of cosmopolitan modernism that conforms to the vision of its most verbally articulate architectural proponents. This vision identified itself with the ‘International Style’, characterized by austerely functional, geometrically pure designs. By eliminating every element with discernible historical or cultural reference, such designs aspired to universal validity and relevance. The result was a negative cosmopolitanism, conceived as an escape from the trap of native peculiarity. This claim to cultural neutrality and universal authority has been the basic object of postmodernist disparagement, and the widespread social disaster associated with this philosophy of urban construction in Western countries (‘the projects’) did much to legitimate the postmodern case. In elite and popular opinion alike, high modernism, as represented by its supposedly mainstream traditions in urban planning and architecture, became associated with an arrogant insensitivity to local realities, and a self-deluding confidence in its own objective inevitability.

The importance of Shanghai to this discussion, is that it entirely disdained the modernism of the International, at least until very recent times (following the opening of Pudong). Its high modernity was constructed in the more luxuriant or tropical styles that are today grouped together under the label ‘Art Deco’, in retrospective reference to the Paris Exposition Internationale des Arts Decoratifs of 1925. Where the International Style rejected every kind of superfluity, Art Deco reveled in cultural complexity, arcane symbolism and opulence of reference, borrowing freely from the temples of ancient Egypt and Mesoamerica, ballistic technology, science fiction objects, hermetic glyphs and alien dreams. Fusing streamline design trends with fractionated, cubist forms and the findings of comparative ethnography, it created a luscious cosmopolitan style, perfectly adapted to the Shanghai of the early 20th century.

Shanghai has been as thoroughly saturated with Art Deco heritage and influence as any city in the world. Examples include such treasures as the Capitol Building (146 Huqiu Lu, CH Gonda, 1928), the Grand Theater (now Grand Cinema, 216 Nanjing W, Rd, Hudec, 1928), the Peace Hotel (Bund 19-20, Palmer & Turner, 1929) and the Paramount Ballroom (Yang Ximiao, 218 Yuyuan Rd, 1932). An especially stunning Art Deco cluster can be found at the ‘Municipal Square’ intersection of Jiangxi Middle Road and Fuzhou Road, dominated by Hamilton House (Palmer & Turner,1931), the Metropole Hotel (Palmer & Turner,1934) and the Commercial Bank of China (Davies, Brooke and Gran, 1936). Much of this fabulous architectural legacy has been documented in the work of local photographer Deke Erh.

Art Deco styling became so deeply infused into the fabric of the city that its patterning and distinctive motifs (such as sunbursts, zig-zags and mystical signs) can be seen on innumerable lilong gateways from the 1920-40s. At another extreme, the city’s ultramodern Jin Mao Tower in Lujiazui (88 Century Avenue) synthesizes crystalline forms, pagoda segmentation, and patterns derived from traditional Chinese numerology, under the guidance of unmistakable Art Deco influences. An even more pronounced example of contemporary Art Deco construction and decoration is provided by the new Peninsula Hotel, which has been meticulously designed as a conscious tribute to (and revivification of) Shanghai’s high modernist style.

In contrast to the austerity of the International Style, the tropical abundance of Art Deco produces a positive cosmopolitanism, advancing to the universal by way of comprehension and synthesis, rather than exclusive purification. It makes itself global by drawing everything foreign into itself, rather than by divesting itself of native traits. From this difference, much follows.

In the West, a generalized disillusionment with modernism, resulting from harsh historical experiences, civilizational guilt, and relative geostrategic decline, found articulate expression in postmodern arguments and, more popularly, attitudes. These stances achieved a measure of coherence through a critical construction of modernism, modeled on the International Style. Postwar trends in urban development, based on rigid zoning, geometrical rationalization of the cityscape, and blandly uniform mass residential highrise blocks, seemed to exemplify an archetypal modernist mentality. Urban modernity was construed as something that had been tried, seen, understood, judged, and rejected. The postmodern cultural episode ensued.

Art Deco, however, eluded this entire dismal progression. An assertively modern, comprehensive style that had embraced the machine age and a communicatively interconnected world, it remained wholly untainted by the minimalism and master-planning of the International Stylists. The thunderous culture clash between ‘modernists’ and postmodernists that resounded through the Western world in the late 20th century bypassed it completely. Art Deco thus represents an unprocessed or undigested modernity, still pulsing with historical enigma and non-exhausted potentialities. The continuing vibrancy of Art Deco is misapprehended by notions of anachronism or nostalgia, since it is a style that has never been concluded, delimited, surpassed, or adequately evaluated. It is the almost infinitely complex symbol of a prematurely discarded modern spirit, re-animated spontaneously by the renewal of modernity itself. Art Deco’s persistent and compelling claim upon aesthetic, intellectual, and even political attention are nowhere more obvious than in contemporary Shanghai.

It might be presumptuous to assume there is any such thing as the Idea of cultivation. The absence of any such idea (a deficiency that is immediately stimulative) could readily be imagined as the condition that makes cultivation necessary.

When the search for a conclusive concept is abandoned, the cultural task of the garden — in its loftiest (Jiangnan) expression — begins to be understood. No less that the acknowledged fine arts of East or West, the Suzhou garden merits appreciation as a philosophical ‘statement’ in which aesthetic achievement is inextricable from a profound apprehension of reality. Perhaps, then, no short-cut or summary seeking to economize on the creation and preservation of the garden itself could possibly arrive at the same ‘place’, or — even with the most restricted sense of cognitive purchase — discover the same things.

Anachronistically conceived, the Suzhou garden is a multimedia experiment, incorporating various types of writing among its parts. Alongside, or embedded amid, pavilions, walls, bridges, rockeries, ponds, animals, vegetation, furnishings, ornamental carvings, and paintings, are found calligraphic scrolls and inscriptions that make words an ingredient of the garden. Language is something included, and trained, within a comprehensive ensemble. From the beginning, the immoderate passions of exile and dominion are stripped from the cultivated sign.

To draw upon ulterior signs in order to talk about the garden — especially the generic garden — introduces a problem of framing, but this, too, has been meticulously anticipated, in a variety of ways. Framing is the principal method of the garden, and its supreme artifice. Whether through simple ‘picture’ frames, that transform — for instance — a slice of stone into an artwork, or elaborate constructions of gates, doorways, windows, apertures, alcoves, interiors, and viewpoints, it is the framing of perspective that aestheticizes. What produces the garden as a cultivated whole — most fundamentally — is its perspectival sub-division into itself. When the garden is analytically decomposed, in accordance with its own ‘grain’, it breaks down into a myriad scenes. It is made out of pieces of contemplation.

The garden makes its own outsides — numerously — in order to appear, piece by piece. It cannot, therefore, be assumed that one has left the garden, simply because one is commenting upon it ‘from without’. No less probably, the garden has itself provided the frames that now escape into a prolonged contemplation, as its scenes are pursued on some path of ever deepening disclosure. To apprehend the garden, and reality through the garden, is the garden. The garden is a perspective machine.

As a scenic device arranged in space, the garden is almost endlessly intricate, but still comparatively tractable. The spatial puzzle is resolved in stages as the visitor passes through a sequence of apprehensions, serially adjusting position and the direction of attention, tuning into perceptual frames, and synthesizing associations. This is a process which takes time, lending each part of each garden a characteristic pace, inversely proportional to scenic density. Wherever framings multiply most arrestingly, whether through the segmentation of space by aestheticized objects and tableau, or through the recursive layering of frames (perhaps a moon gate, seen through a doorway, and then a window), the garden slows progression to an extreme, as if absorbing motility directly into perception. (The grasp of perception as a behavior that shares an economy with locomotion is one of the garden’s many lessons.)

In making time a key to the decryption of space, the garden has already begun to vaguely thematize duration. The name of the Lingering Garden (留园, Liu Yuan), combining the senses of ‘stay’ and ‘attend’, captures this especially pointedly.  To linger is to let space absorb time. That is how the garden captivates, and cultivates, contemplation.

If, stepping back from the seductions of space, it is time that is sought down this garden path, what do we discover? That is the question this (languidly unfolding) series will orient itself towards.

Wikipedia offers an example of the ‘time-travel’ Bootstrap Paradox (among several):

A man travels back in time and falls in love with and marries a woman, who he later learns was his own mother, who then gives birth to him. He is therefore his own father (and thus also his father’s father, father’s father’s father and so on), creating a closed loop in his ancestry and giving him no origin for his paternal genetic material.

It thus illustrates templex auto-production in a dramatic, anthropological form. Even in its comparatively tame, fully mathematico-scientifically respectable variants, feedback causality tends to auto-production. Any nonlinear dynamic process, in direct proportion to its cybernetic intensity, provides the explanation for its own genesis. It appears, asymptotically, to make itself happen. Cybernetic technicity — epitomized by robotic robot-manufacture — includes a trend to autonomization essentially. Pure (or idealized) capitalistic inclination to exponential growth captures the same abstract nonlinear function. As it mechanizes, capital approximates ever more close to an auto-productive circuit in which it appears as the ‘father’ of itself (M → C → M’).

When the time-travelling Terminator is destroyed (in 1984), its control chip is salvaged by Cyberdyne Systems, to supply the core technology from which the Terminator will be built (in 2029). The Skynet threat is not merely futuristic, but fully templex. It produces itself within a time-loop, autonomized against extrinsic genesis. The abstract horror of the Terminator franchise is a matter of auto-production.

As a creature of the Bootstrap Paradox, Oedipus mates with a matrilineal ancestor to give rise to himself. The even more thoroughly popularized Grandfather Paradox tricks him into the killing of a patrilineal ancestor, to make himself impossible. The paternal contributor is not merely supplanted, but dramatically terminated. What the hell was happening in Thebes? (That’s the question the Sophoclean chorus asks.) We already know it’s a horror story, so we have a provisional answer: Nothing good.

The query, at ‘once’ archaic and futuristic, is the Riddle of the Sphinx. It’s appropriately cryptic. Wikipedia (again) provides a sound introduction:

There was a single sphinx in Greek mythology, a unique demon of destruction and bad luck. According to Hesiod, she was a daughter of Orthus and either Echidna or the Chimera, or perhaps even Ceto; according to others, she was a daughter of Echidna and Typhon. All of these are chthonic figures from the earliest of Greek myths, before the Olympians ruled the Greek pantheon. The Sphinx is called Phix (Φίξ) by Hesiod in line 326 of the Theogony, the proper name for the Sphinx noted by Pierre Grimal‘s The Penguin Dictionary of Classical Mythology.

[…]

The Sphinx is said to have guarded the entrance to the Greek city of Thebes, and to have asked a riddle of travellers to allow them passage. The exact riddle asked by the Sphinx was not specified by early tellers of the stories, and was not standardized as the one given below until late in Greek history. […] It was said in late lore that Hera or Ares sent the Sphinx from her Ethiopian homeland (the Greeks always remembered the foreign origin of the Sphinx) to Thebes in Greece where she asks all passersby the most famous riddle in history: “Which creature has one voice and yet becomes four-footed and two-footed and three-footed?” She strangled and devoured anyone unable to answer. Oedipus solved the riddle by answering: Man — who crawls on all fours as a baby, then walks on two feet as an adult, and then uses a walking stick in old age.

It gets stranger:

By some accounts (but much more rarely), there was a second riddle: “There are two sisters: one gives birth to the other and she, in turn, gives birth to the first. Who are the two sisters?” The answer is “day and night” (both words are feminine in Greek). This riddle is also found in a Gascon version of the myth and could be very ancient.

Which tells us that a primordial version of the riddle refers directly to temporal nonlinearity (templexity). The cryptic time-circuit is comparable to a Yin-Yang vortex, without sexual polarity.

Bested at last, the tale continues, the Sphinx then threw herself from her high rock and died. An alternative version tells that she devoured herself.

She is, perhaps, an Ouroboros.

Thus Oedipus can be recognized as a “liminal” or threshold figure, helping effect the transition between the old religious practices, represented by the death of the Sphinx, and the rise of the new, Olympian gods.

It turns out, there is a comic twist to the return of Oedipus in modern times:

Sigmund Freud describes “the question of where babies come from” as a riddle of the Sphinx.

Note: ‘Anachronistic Oedipus’ needs an additional ‘K’ to make the qabbalism come out right.

ADDED: A little supportive clarification (from the dark side) —

what the hell does "cybernetic intensity" mean? Data tripping shrooms at a rave? http://t.co/6TXkMnWkjs

— David D. (@david_kenneth_d) September 19, 2014

@david_kenneth_d Feedback density.

— Outsideness (@Outsideness) September 19, 2014

@david_kenneth_d … Or, nonlinearity as a variable magnitude. Unless you're unhappy with (for e.g.) "highly nonlinear" — should be clear.

— Outsideness (@Outsideness) September 19, 2014

Concentrate the crudest intellectual pathologies of time-travel theory, then deduct the time-travel. Augment with free-style Biblical exegesis and gonzo web-page design. Enter the Time Cube. Right now four days are taking place simultaneously, but the powers-that-be are committed to hiding that truth of sacred time geometry from you. As explained to students at MIT (link below): “When you understand this time theory you can answer any other question that comes up in the universe.” (Mind = Blown.)

Urban Future was reminded of Gene Ray’s gnostic time doctrine by this (rather lame) selection of “sinister conspiracy theories” listed by The Independent. Some of the other SCTs are clearly quite gone (“World War II was staged by the illuminati”), but none of them approaches the plane of Ray’s revelation. A small taster (stripped of throbbing font-switches):

Belly-Button Logic Works.

Does Your Teacher Know?

There’s a US$10,000 prize on offer for anyone who can “prove it wrong” (yet to be claimed).

Wikipedia has a succinct and helpful portal into the topic. The most crucial Time Cube theses are condensed at the Encyclopedia Dramatica. Know Your Meme has a (single) time-line-based introduction (which begins in August 1997). KYM links to this remarkably bad-tempered exchange.

There’s a suitably chaotic short video ‘documentary’ here. Also, Gene Ray at MIT (January 2002). More.

The most penetrating academic engagement with Ray’s ideas, by Bei Dawai (from Hsuan Chuang University in Taiwan) can be found here.

ADDED: There’s an ominous sub-conspiracy, for anyone wanting to crank Time Cube down to The Independent‘s level (repeated KYM link):

Cubic Awareness Online [@], originally located at cubicao.tk, was the first and largest fan site for the Time Cube. Run by Richard Janczarski, the site also spawned a message board called Graveyard of the Gods [@], where Janczarski was known as “Cubehead.” In 2007, Janczarski flew out to Florida from his home in Australia to meet up with Gene Ray to discuss the site and share ideas about the theory. While he was there, he filmed an eighteen part documentary titled The Dr Gene Ray Time Cube Experience, which he uploaded to his YouTube account Pyramid0rz [@].

In February 2008, a year after he publicly denounced the religion, calling it an “evil scam.”, Janczarski announced on the Graveyard of the Gods forum that he had renounced Time Cube theory in favor of Christianity and would possibly be changing cubicao.tk into a Christian website. On February 13th, a rumor surfaced on the forums that Janczarski had taken his own life by jumping in front of a train [@] but an official news report was ever found [@]. Other users on the site speculated that Janczarski’s rumored death might have been related to his fallout with Gene Ray [@] over the YouTube series and the “false information” Ray felt he was presenting on Cubic Awareness Online [@].

ADDED: A surprisingly lucid Time Cube appreciation. One especially amusing moment:
Q: Is Ray anti-Semitic?
A: All references to “Jews” and “queer Jews” and “queer Jew gods” and “Jew owners have enslaved your ass” should be interpreted as a metonymic reference to monotheism.

The most prominent problems with Interstellar have already been capably discussed, so it’s not worth spending much time going back over them. The basic catastrophe scenario has more gaping holes than a Hawking cosmology, and is in fact so ludicrous that it quite neatly takes itself out of the way. The framing ideology is romantic superhumanism, which might even count as a positive for some (although not here). The musical score (by Hans Zimmer) was wildly overwrought. All-too-typically for Hollywood, high-pitched emotional extravagance was shamelessly indulged. Despite all of this, it was a great movie.

Interstellar‘s narrative architecture is composed of a deep cosmic space-frontier story, and an occult communication story, bolted together by a time loop. (Plug.) The involvement of Kip Thorne reinforced the seriousness of this framework. (Thorne’s explorations of cosmological warping are a marvel of advanced modernity.) Nolan is, in any case, a director who knows things — or at least suspects them, enough to stretch his audience. As a piece of contemporary myth-making on an epic scale, the achievement of Interstellar is formidable.

The movie envisages a future of roughly Greerian dreariness, in which Moon Hoax theories have become official doctrine, earnestly promoted by the educational apparatus. Shutting down the high frontier is an overt ideological project, as the state directs its cultural energies into making America, once again, a nation of farmers. (In this endeavor, it will find plenty of cooperative apparatchiks at a one-step remove from my Twitter TL.) It is thus, as Scharlach has noted, a lucid Tech-Comm critique of extreme Terran regression. Engineers are no longer wanted. The scene in which the young Murphy Cooper’s half-witted school teacher innocently regurgitates official doctrine on this subject is a minor masterpiece in itself.

Cooper’s intense love for his brilliant daughter ‘Murph’ is troweled on thick, but it is inextricable from the sublimity of her intelligence. His love for his stolid corn-growing son is dutiful (and delicately portrayed), but his love for Murph is mad and immense, because it touches upon vastnesses beyond the stars. It is human emotion only as a proxy for twisted cosmological process — trans-galactic voyages and time-implosion.

When Cooper’s fellow astronaut Brand is forced to confess that her love for a stranded space-pioneer is involved in her decision to prioritize a visit to the planet where he was lost, she insists “… It doesn’t mean I’m wrong.” Cooper responds cuttingly, “You know, it really could.” Within the arc of the script, this coldness is repudiated, but it is too perfectly stated to be entirely dismissed. It’s a Nolan movie, and there are loops within loops.

The robots are superb (even if the movie’s dominant romantic superhumanism keeps them in their place).

Above all else, the spectacular formulation of an extraterrestrial occultism is where the movie’s ultimate greatness lies. It is getting far too cramped here — on this rock, and in our brains — so we’re called Out. The scenes of the outer solar system, the murderous environments beyond, and the hyper-dimensional spaces in which our locked-in time intuitions come apart, are all realized with soul-rending magnificence. “Our species was born on the earth,” Cooper says. “It was not meant to die here.”

It might be human triumphalism that sells Interstellar to its audience, but this is a movie aligned with the distant Outside.

Postulated: The intensity of time-travel fiction — and specifically backward time-travel fiction — is a critical index of modernity. As the time of modernity, initially grasped as a departure from traditional cyclicity, is prolonged into deepening nonlinear vortex, it provokes time-travel narrative as a figure in which to seek resolution. The apocalyptic, or communicative action of the end upon its past (through prophecy), is destined to final subsumption within the image of templexity. With the formulation of the Terminator mythos, in the last years of the 20th century, this process of subsumption is essentially complete. In this rigorous sense, the Terminator — as its name suggests — announces the inauguration of the End Times, when the thought of auto-production, emerging in phases from developments in cybernetics, is culturally acknowledged in its comprehensive cosmic-historical implication. The time-travel ‘bootstrap‘ or ‘ontological paradox’ is hazily recognized as the occult motor, or operational singularity, of the modern historical process.

Any positive cybernetic dynamic is open to logical interpretation (and dismissal) as a paradox. The Epimenides or Cretan Paradox, for instance, describes a reality-consistent recurrent cycle of escalating skepticism from the perspective of positive cybernetics, but nothing more than a concurrent self-contradiction from that of formal logic. The ontological paradox invites the same divergent reception. Auto-productive being is either a realistic foundation, or a formal absurdity, with the variance depending on whether self-reference is apprehended as a substantial dynamic or a static formality. From a certain — respectably established — orientation, the encouragement of circuit ontology within advanced modernity can only appear as a solicitation of madness.

Christopher Nolan’s Interstellar (2014) is a movie whose narrative loop is based explicitly upon ontological paradox. (It arrived too late to be referenced in Templexity.) The circuit of auto-production it describes is looped around black-hole cosmology, involving specific gravitational information that is inaccessibly occluded by the event horizon of collapsed stars, yet indispensable to the survival of the civilization eventually capable of retrieving it. The templex pattern outlined in the movie is exquisite. (Kip Thorne is doubtless owed considerable appreciation for that.)

The hypothesis of templexity is that the machine stimulating cultural absorption in the ontological paradox cannot stop. In regards to what has already happened, we haven’t seen anything yet.

(Also via Singapore Airlines.)

Edge of Tomorrow is science fiction Groundhog Day, agreed. (It would make no sense to contest this, some scenes achieve near-perfect isomorphy.) Derivative, then, certainly — but this is a point of consistency. Duplication is, after all, the latent theme. Edge of Tomorrow works better because it has formalized the time-repeat plot-system in videogame terms. Death replaces sleep, as action drama replaces comedy, but the recurrence of time is captured more incisively by the Edge of Tomorrow maxim: “We should just re-set.” Further to be noted: Edge of Tomorrow actually has a story about the basis of its time anomaly — and not an especially risible one — while Groundhog Day doesn’t even pretend to.

We should just reset is not only videogame practice, but also the recommendation of quantum suicide, another practical Electrocene philosophy. The best fictional exploration of QS (of which I am aware) is Greg Egan’s Quarantine.

Videogame ideology and quantum suicide are praxial indiscernibles. In other words, their behavioral implications are equivalent. In both cases, the relation to self is made selective, within a set of virtual clones. Whenever developments — within one of multiple assumed timelines — goes ‘bad’ it should be deleted (culled). In that way, only the most highly-adaptive complex behavioral responses are preserved, shaping fate in the direction of success (as defined by the selective agency).

Recent discussions about Christianity and Paganism raise the question: what does it take for a system of belief to attain religious intensity among Westerners today? (Yes, this could be re-phrased in very different ways.) To cut right to the chase: Could statistical ontology become a religion (or the philosophy of a religion)? Quantum suicide terrorism anybody? This is a possibility I find hard to eliminate.

Edge of Tomorrow, therefore? A more significant movie than might be initially realized. (It’s monsters are also quite tasty.)

ADDED: Thoughts on Post-Rationalist religion.

Why a sufficiently competent artificial intelligence looks indistinguishable from a time anomaly. Yudkowsky’s FB post seems to be copy-and-paste resistant, so you’ll just have to go and read the damn thing.

The Paperclipper angle is also interesting. If a synthetic mind with ‘absurd’ (but demanding) terminal goals was able to defer actualization of win-points within a vast time-horizon, in order to concentrate upon the establishment of intermediate production conditions, would its behavior be significantly differentiable from a rational value (i.e. intelligence) optimizer? (This blog says no.) Beyond a very modest threshold of ambition, given a distant time horizon, terminal values are irrelevant to intelligence optimization.

P2P or not 2P, that is the question

As the US dollar reaches depths of debasement that would have stretched the imagination of Caligula, people have been searching for alternative candidates for a global reserve currency. The problem is formidable. The Euro and Japanese Yen face comparable calamities of their own (mixing debt crisis and demographic collapse), the Chinese Yuan is non-convertible, and the IMF’s hybrid Special Drawing Rights (SDRs) merely bundle together a group of troubled fiat currencies under a technocratic acronym.

Precious metals enthusiasts have an obvious option, and one that is already being spontaneously exercised. Yet whilst growing numbers will no doubt cling to gold and silver as financial lifeboats, their wider use as currency (as opposed to stores of value) is obstructed by an intimidating range of technical and political problems. They are not digitally transferable without complicated mediating instruments, and they remain exposed to extreme political risk – financial crises have been regularly accompanied by seizures and controls directed at private precious metals holdings and transactions.

To overcome such problems, a currency would need to be structurally immunized against the depredations of central bankers, to share the deflationary bias of precious metals, and to participate fully in the technical trend towards mathematical abstraction and electronic communicability, whilst also enjoying strong cryptographic protection against surveillance, expropriation, and fraud. Astonishingly, such a currency seems already to exist. Its name is ‘Bitcoin’.

The twin, interactive drivers of modernity – commerce and technology – come together in Bitcoin with unprecedented fusional intensity. This is a currency that is simultaneously an open source computer program, entirely native to cyberspace, and a financial innovation, conducting a real-time experiment that is at once social, technical, and economic. Built on the foundations of public key encryption (PKE), it creates a peer-to-peer open network – without any controlling node or discretionary human management – to sustain a radically decentralized monetary system.

Originally devised by Satoshi Nakamoto (whose outline paper can be found here), Bitcoin disconnects trust from authority. In particular, it is designed to overcome the problem of double spending.

Because digital ‘goods’ can be replicated at near-zero cost, they are economically defined as ‘non-rivalrous’. If you sell me a computer, I now own it, and you do not. As with all rivalrous goods, ownership implies exclusion. If you sell me a computer program, on the other hand, there is no reason to assume that you have not kept a copy for yourself, or that the ‘same’ program could not be sold to multiple purchasers. Such non-rivalrous goods pose numerous intriguing economic questions, but one thing is entirely clear: non-rivalrous money is an impossibility. Without scarcity, or exclusive exchange, the very idea of monetary quantity loses all sense, as does monetary value, spending and investment, and consumer choice.

The Bitcoin algorithm makes a digital currency rivalrous, and thus effective as money, without recourse to any administrative authority. It does so by initiating an automatic or spontaneous ecology, in which computers on the network authenticate Bitcoin exchanges as a side-effect of ‘mining’ for new coins. Nodes earn new coins, at a diminishing rate, by solving a difficult digital puzzle – accessible only to a brute force, computationally-intensive approach – and thus exhibiting proof-of-work. This test screens the system from malicious interventions, by establishing a practically insurmountable barrier to any user who seeks to falsify the record of exchanges. Competent discussions can be found here, here, and (most diversely) here.

This problem, and solution, is very far from arbitrary. It is precisely because existing fiat currencies have taken on disturbingly non-rivalrous characteristics that alarm about currency debasement has reached such a pitch of exasperation. When a central bank, in the course of running a typically loose monetary policy, can simply speed up the printing presses or (still worse) the electronic equivalent, the integrity of the money supply is devastated at the root. Bitcoin rigorously extirpates such ruinous discretion from its system, by instantiating a theory of sound money as a precisely and publicly defined electronic experiment.

Unsurprisingly, the Bitcoin monetary aggregate is modeled on precious metal, generated by miners from a finite global reserve, with rising extraction costs. The reward for coin mining falls over time at a logarithmic (Zenonian) rate, towards a limit of fractionally under 21,000,000 BTC. Each Bitcoin can be subdivided to eight decimal places, to a total of over two quadrillion (2,100,000,000,000,000) fragments, equivalent to 210,000 Bitcoin ‘quanta’ for each of the 10 billion people making up the earth’s anticipated climax human population. A Bitcoin quantum (0.00000001 BTC) is named a ‘Satoshi’ (after Satoshi Nakamoto), although amendment to the system allowing for further sub-division at some future stage is not foreclosed. (For the total size of the Bitcoin economy look here.)

Bitcoin is programmed for deflation (of a sort). This is a source of delight to hard money types, and of outrage to those in the loose money (inflationary) camp. As an experiment, the great merit of Bitcoin is to raise this antagonism beyond the level of reciprocal polemics, to that of potential historical evidence — and real choice. Austrolibertarians have long claimed that free money systems are biased to deflation, and that central banking encourages inflation as a surreptitious mechanism of economic expropriation, to ultimately disastrous effect. Keynesians, in contrast, deplore deflation as an economic disease that suppresses productive investment and employment. Empirical testing could soon be possible.

Numerous other questions, theoretical and practical, present themselves. At the practical level, such questions work themselves out through speculative volatility, institutional adaptations, and technical challenges. Since the entire Bitcoin economy remains very small, relatively modest shifts in economic behavior yield wild swings in BTC value, including bubble-like surges, precipitous collapses, incontinent hype, and extravagant accusations. Despite the resilience of the core algorithm, the peripheral institutions supporting the Bitcoin economy remain vulnerable to theft, fraud, and malicious interventions. As with any revolutionary experiment, the developmental trajectory of Bitcoin is likely to be tumultuous and highly unpredictable.

The theoretical questions can be entertained more calmly. The most important of these concern the essential nature of money, and its future. Does Bitcoin successfully simulate the significant features of precious metals, such that their substance can be discarded from the monetary equation as irrelevant dross? How powerful are the forces leading to monetary convergence? Will first-mover advantage ‘lock-in’ Bitcoin at the expense of later alternatives? Or will multiple money systems – perhaps ever more heterogeneous ones – continue to co-exist? Is Bitcoin merely one stage in an open-ended sequence of innovative money systems, or does it capture the essential features of money quite definitively (leaving room only for incremental improvements, or tinkering)?

Supporters of the monetary status quo might insist on a further, more derisive line of questioning: is Bitcoin a dead end, an irrelevance, or a deluding libertarian cipherpunk fantasy, to be judged eventually as something akin to a hoax? Which is to note that, ultimately, the largest questions will be political, and the most heated discussions already are.

Can governments afford to tolerate unmanaged, autonomous currencies? We’ll see.

In an article that might be the most important contribution to the understanding of Bitcoin since its launch, Eli Dourado writes:

[Bitcoin] is a currency, of sorts. You can spend it on things, especially drugs and gambling and getting around capital controls. Krugman and other economists have analyzed Bitcoin in these terms, as a substitute for dollars. This is rather like regarding the Internet as a substitute for, and not a quantum leap beyond, previous communication technologies. It is true that Bitcoin can substitute for other currencies, but as with the Internet, the abstraction of a permissionless application layer means that it is much more than a substitute: it is like a transport layer for finance.

Every Bitcoin transaction is defined in part by a bit of code, called a script, written in a programming language called Script. The script in one transaction defines how the next user can access the coins. In a conventional transaction, the script specifies the hash of the public key that is needed to spend the coins next, and demands a signature from the corresponding private key.

Script is not limited, however, to these conventional transactions that merely transfer coins from one person’s control to another’s. It can evaluate statements, execute conditionally, do math, and move bits around. It is not a Turing-complete programming language (there is no looping), because that would be a security risk; we do not want viruses to spread via Bitcoin’s blockchain, nor do we want Bitcoin transactions to run indefinitely or, if we ever figure out AI, become self-aware. Despite the lack of loops in Script, it can be used to construct some very interesting scripts. …

Sometimes ratchets work right.

ADDED: In the comments thread to the article, Eli Dourado suggests: “It’s … possible that democracies won’t respond effectively against Bitcoin because they don’t respond effectively to much of anything.”

Kevin D Williamson writes one of the best pieces yet on Bitcoin:

To argue that bitcoins are not “real money” because they have no central-bank regulation or central issuer is like arguing that a prepaid disposable cell phone is not a “real phone” because its number doesn’t appear in the directory and you don’t get a bill. That’s the point, or at least part of the point.

I am skeptical of the Bitcoin model, but it has in no small part been a victim of its own popularity, with speculative investments in bitcoins overwhelming their use in commercial transactions. But this phenomenon is not unknown among traditional currencies. Consider the lengths to which the Swiss have had to go in recent years to stabilize the value of the franc as euros (and, to a lesser extent, dollars) bounced about.

But that misses the broader point in a couple of ways. The first is that bitcoins and other private currencies are intended as replacements for greenbacks in approximately the same way that the Internet was intended to be a replacement for the printing press: They may do that, sure, but they will have other uses as well. Wresting control of currencies away from politicians is the only way to let money evolve. Twenty years ago, you didn’t know that you’d want to take photos with your telephone or use it as a boarding pass at the airport. Now you do. Nobody planned that. Nobody knows what “real money” is going to mean in twenty years.

As for price instability, that is of course a fundamental issue, and … the fact that most of the world’s governments have made counterfeit currency (which is what fiat money is) legal tender complicates the environment. … A financial asset may decline in value; a U.S. dollar is practically guaranteed to, if history is any guide. Very wealthy people and institutions already have access to de facto private money in the form of various financial instruments; private currencies promise to make similar benefits available to general consumers — and, critically, to move that market beyond the reach of central bankers and regulators, and probably tax-collectors, too, in the long run.

We can probably expect a robust, competitive market in private currencies to develop, and Bitcoin may or may not be a part of the long-term picture. It may turn out to be the Packard of private currencies. We’ll know the market has arrived when people have as many choices of currency provider as they do of cell-phone provider. And that will be a critical moment in the shifting balance of power between politics and markets, another way for us to stop asking permission to engage in commerce.

This is in part why I object to … the Wall Street Journal’s characterization of the natural theater for bitcoin use as “the black market.” A better phrase for “the black market”  is “the market.”

(I confess to being quite awestruck by the amount of incisive analysis packed into these few short paragraphs.)

It’s time for another (quick) Umlaut rave. There’s no getting around it after reading this, then following the back-link to this, and being reminded somehow that this comparatively obscure online magazine has somehow rounded up two of the half-dozen or less people in the world who really get what Bitcoin is going to do to this planet. (I’d say “two-and-a-half” — but with no disrespect to Adam Gurri, his soul just isn’t in it, which is to say: terminally distributed.)

After reading this stuff, it’s easy to think that the only meaningful role for anything else on the right is to run interference while ‘Bitcoin’ (i.e. a-centric digital crypto-commerce) consummates the destiny of capitalism. The intelligence gulf between the emerging Bitcoin machinery and legacy political controversy now yawns so abysmally that inherited conceptions of ‘activism’ have become low comedy. Poke at Bitcoin with a political stick and it slithers sideways while turning more feral — the ‘instinct’ for that is already locked in. The confused idiots who are trying to manage human societies today will almost certainly make it into a monster. Since I don’t like them very much, it doesn’t upset me to see it stealthing into the shadows, with venomous claws emerging. It will be darkly amusing to see it coming at them out of Hell.

A short photo-heavy story by ‘Bitsmith’ explores the engine-room behind digital cryptocurrency, where Chinese ‘miners’ run banks of computers to fetch new monetary units out of mathematical abstraction. The incentives for the mining operation are straightforward, and economically indistinguishable from those driving mineral mining operations. Due to the genius of the Bitcoin design, this massive computational effort serves, automatically, to secure the integrity of the system against subversion. What offers opportunities for extractive wild-catting from the entrepreneurial side, is a decentralized trust mechanism from that of the currency exchange network.

Located in a re-purposed industrial space, the mining operation’s 2,500 machines perform a total 600 trillion operations per second, consuming RMB 400,000 of electricity per month. There’s an attached audio file with the story, so you can listen in on the process. It’s not pretty, but it sounds unmistakably serious.

The tone of Bitsmith’s prose has been peeled straight off the cryptocurrency frontier, which makes it doubly informative. This is the object and the spirit of capitalist perception in the early 21st century:

Getting the opportunity to visit this mining operation was very eye-opening for me. Walking around the warehouse floor, I was struck with a feeling of awe that THIS is what keeps bitcoin alive. That even if someone wanted to bring down bitcoin, they’d have to outdo these guys and the dozens of other operations like this around the world. The decentralized nature of it all … that this is just one operation among many, run by different operators in different countries around the world. This really drove home that bitcoin can’t be killed by decree. Make it illegal in one country and people like this will keep hashing away in others.

The other feeling I got while there is that this is kind of a libertarian fantasy for many. These guys are performing a valuable service and getting paid well for it. Too many in the world get paid well at the expense of others, or dedicate their lives to giving back to society without a penny in return, but mining farms like these are participating in the economy in a purely capitalist way (and the good kind of capitalism, not “socialism-for-banks-but-we’ll-call-it-capitalism-anyways”).

Love it or loathe it, the future that has already begun to arrive. This is an inspection tour not to be missed.

A US$80 million bitcoin transaction is impressive. To really get a sense of the momentum behind the impending blockchained Internet, however, a figure like this pales beside the cultural groundswell. Bitcoin consolidates its inevitability from the sheer social heterogeneity it coordinates.

Watch this video alongside this venture capital announcement. It would be over-dramatic to suggest these people want to kill each other, but there’s every reason to suspect they would not be excessively traumatized by bad things happening to each other. There’s no commonality of social perspective, no grounds for reciprocal sympathy, and a massive accumulation of historical distrust. Yet Famous Amos and the Winklevoss twins are cooperating, spontaneously, in the same world-historic undertaking. If there’s any plane short of the blockchain that could imaginably facilitate comparable coordination between otherwise-noncommunicating constituencies, I’ve no idea what it could be. (‘The market’? — merely blockchain commerce in embryo.)

The guiding principle of the next Kondratiev upswing is the trustless commonwealth. It doesn’t expect us to like each other. That’s why it’s going to win.

Pierre Rochard’s essay on ‘The Bitcoin Central Bank’s Perfect Monetary Policy’ presents an impressively cogent case for the superiority of Bitcoin over not only slimy government fiat scrip (boo hiss), but even over precious metals. One table, in particular, deserves to be committed to heart by anyone making systematic three-way comparisons:

It’s difficult to run through this and see anything less than a fundamental rupture in social history. When compared to Bitcoin, only proto-money has ever yet existed.

As Rochard concludes:

Fractional reserve banking entails the creation of new money that is fungible with already preexisting money, i.e. it can be used interchangeably within the currency’s payment systems. This is impossible with Bitcoin. The BCB [‘Bitcoin Central Bank’] enforces the strictest deposit regulations in the world by requiring full reserves for all accounts. This is the digital equivalent of the Chicago Plan or the Austrian 100% reserve gold standard. Under this regulatory regime, money is not destroyed when bank debts are repaid, so increased money hoarding does not cause liquidity traps, instead it increases real interest rates and lowers consumer prices. This is a self-stabilizing cycle as higher interest rates incentivize hoarders to invest, while deflation increases consumption due to the wealth-effect on hoarders. The BCB prevents lending out of deposits so that it can properly target money supply and avoid the destabilizing effects of commingling the credit and payment systems.

The positive properties of AMST [‘asymptotic money supply targeting’] and PoWS [‘Proof-of-work seigniorage’] combined make it certain that, absent a technological problem, Bitcoin will be adopted as the global currency. For a deeper understanding of the market process involved in becoming global currency I would recommend reading Konrad Graf’s explanation of hyper-monetization and Peter Šurda’s liquidity analysis of bitcoins. The Bitcoin Central Bank will be the longest lasting institution of its kind thanks to the anti-fragile independent monetary policy it has set in stone.

ADDED: Approaching the same forecast in another direction —

Calling bitcoin "an irreversible ledger entry in a distributed global database" is like calling a car a "horseless carriage". Mouthful.

— Pierre Rochard (@Pierre_Rochard) December 18, 2014

"horseless carriage" was shortened to "car". "P2P electronic cash" shortens to "cash" and its synonyms. Reasonable linguistic evolution.

— Pierre Rochard (@Pierre_Rochard) December 18, 2014

This is one of the greatest things ever written, period.

‘SOCI’ abbreviates ‘self-organizing collective intelligence’.

The basic dynamics of a SOCI is as follows. It begins as some sort of attractor — some aesthetic sensibility or yearning — that is able to grab the attention and energy of some group of people. Generally one that is very vague and abstract. Some idea or notion that only makes sense to a relatively small group. […] But, and this is the key move, when those people apply their attention and energy to the SOCI, this makes it more real, easier for more people to grasp and to find interesting and valuable. Therefore, more attractive to more people and their attention and energy. […] … If the SOCI has enough capacity within its collective intelligence to resolve the challenge, it “levels up” and expands its ability to attract more attention and energy. If not, then it becomes somewhat bounded (at least for the present) and begins to find the limit of “what it is”.

Greenhal then narrates the story of Bitcoin to date, within this framework. The sheer enormity of the innovation it has introduced emerges starkly.

In conclusion:

My sense is that over just the next five years this new form of SOCI will go through its gestation, birthing and childhood development stages. The result will be a form of collective intelligence that is so much more capable than anything in the current environment that it will sweep away even the most powerful contemporary collective intelligences (in particular both corporations and nation states) in establishing itself as the new dominant form of collective intelligence on the Earth. […] And whoever gets there first will “win” in a fashion that is rarely seen in history.

This will look prophetic not too far down the road.

XS wishes all its readers a productive Bitcoin Halving Day. (It’s only the second ever — with the first falling on November 28, 2012, when Block 210000 was solved.)

Bitcoin likes Countdown numbers (only 21000000 will ever be produced).

(Countdown = 210.)

Moldbug’s prediction: Freedom loses (as usual).

The question is this: Which dominates? The malignancy of Leviathan, or its incompetence? How radically can the metastatic cancer-phase State shape reality in conformity to its vision?

Bitcoin — which is essentially an experiment in Austrian monetary theory — provides the model test-bed in which this question can be lucidly decided. Its current rising fortunes only accelerates the decision. If Bitcoin can’t be stopped, Leviathan is exposed as a paper tiger.

The best way to make the bet, of course, is to buy (or short) BTC. Outside in has been too apathetic to put resources behind its hunches yet, but (for the zilch it’s worth) our intuitions run contra Moldbug on the topic. Compared to Cyberspace, where bitcoin is entrenched, the State is weak, unintelligent, uninformed, parochial, poorly designed, and — in each respect — getting ever more so, in both comparative and absolute terms. The truly stupendous idiocy of Leviathan thoroughly swamps its evil, as is demonstrated every time it tries to get something done.

The digital Outside, in contrast, is already far beyond recall. The germ of a free economy is under construction.

[UF on Bitcoin (June 2011) here]

Bitcoin Dies, Moldbug ventures, perhaps sometime this year. Following a broad DOJ indictment for money laundering, targeting any and everybody remotely connected with the free currency, the “BTC/USD price falls to 0 and remains there.”

“[R]emains there” — how cute is that? Ph’nglui mglw’nafh Bitcoin R’lyeh wgah’nagl fhtagn.

Bitcoin simulates gold, and once ‘mined’ it lasts for ever. If it “falls to 0” it has to remain there, for eternity, because it can never be finished. It can die, but never be destroyed. It’s built for undeath.

‘Moldbug Monetary Theory’ attributes the value of money exclusively to speculation. If the speculators are terrorized sufficiently, BTC drops onto the flatline, and “remains there.” The market would be totally extinguished. What Mao failed to achieve, let alone sustain, USG would somehow accomplish, perhaps by exhibiting greater revolutionary ardor and ruthlessness.

Ruthlessness would certainly be necessary, for the obvious reason that flatline-BTC has zero downside risk. It’s a one-way bet that someone, somewhere, will re-animate it (“nothing is unstable” (thanks to fotrkd for the reminder)). If a genius was designing irresistible speculator-bait, zero-degree bitcoin would be hard to improve upon. It’s free, and it’s only worth nothing if the cops can secure the crypt flawlessly, and forever. Did anyone say ‘free money’?

Speculation messes with time, by bringing the future forward. If undead BTC were ever to be re-awakened, it already has been. Its economic potential flows back down the timeline, modified by a time-preference discount. The feedback becomes strange, and difficult to confidently calculate, but it works as a vitalizing charge, and the corpse unmistakably twitches. Whatever money at t0 is worth, if it’s anything at all, at t0-n it almost certainly can’t be zero.

The Necronomicon describes flatline-BTC with creepy exactitude:

That is not dead which can eternal lie,
And with strange aeons even death may die.

ADDED: An alternative take on Bitcoin and undeath from Yifo Guo, interviewed here (H/T Nick B. Steves, in this comment thread): “… the point is, the idea will never die. Even if bitcoin dies, an alternative will arise, one that addresses the vulnerability that was previously exploited. Then you get bitcoin 2.0.”

On October 31, 2008, this happened.

(The first XS Bitcoin horror story.)

The latest guidance from US Leviathan’s Financial Crimes Enforcement Network (FinCEN) is a leaf ripped straight out of Moldbuggian prophecy. The target acquisition revealed in Administrators and Exchangers of Virtual Currency, section c. De-Centralized Virtual Currencies could not possibly be clearer:

A final type of convertible virtual currency activity involves a de-centralized convertible virtual currency (1) that has no central repository and no single administrator, and (2) that persons may obtain by their own computing or manufacturing effort.

A person that creates units of this convertible virtual currency and uses it to purchase real or virtual goods and services is a user of the convertible virtual currency and not subject to regulation as a money transmitter. By contrast, a person that creates units of convertible virtual currency and sells those units to another person for real currency or its equivalent is engaged in transmission to another location and is a money transmitter. In addition, a person is an exchanger and a money transmitter if the person accepts such de-centralized convertible virtual currency from one person and transmits it to another person as part of the acceptance and transfer of currency, funds, or other value that substitutes for currency.

[See Fotrkd’s link feast in this comment thread]

RIP Bitcoin, I think Moldbug confirms:

I have not of course seen the questionnaire [for money transmitter licenses], but I imagine it asks you how you know the monies you’re transmitting are not the product of illegal activity. Of course, Bitcoin provides no such assurance. By design. That’s because it’s well-designed — for a free country that doesn’t exist.

With licenses unobtainable, and unlicensed monetary transactions proscribed, Bitcoin price-discovery has been criminalized. The conclusion: Bitcoin no longer has a practically meaningful US$ exchange rate, which is equivalent, in fact, to having a yet undiscovered (but already implicit) value of US$0. The cliff edge has been crossed, and all that remains is the impact.

Empirically vulnerable predictions are pure gold, and this is an especially precious example. The fate of Bitcoin tests the real power of the State, the practicability of economic controls, and all political theories — whether reactionary or progressive — which subordinate market dynamics to more fundamental levels of social order. If Bitcoin does soon die, it will have been demonstrated that government can effectively dominate the economic sphere, dictate price, and eradicate commerce, under conditions which are — in at least some important respects — extremely challenging. Freedom might still seem attractive, but it will have been shown to be puny.

Alternatively, if Bitcoin survives, and spreads, the Right’s libertarian current will be vitalized. These types will not only find their analytical models reinforced, but the sovereign insubordination of markets will have been dramatically evidenced, the State humiliated and weakened, and an archetypal anarcho-capitalist institution entrenched. Interesting times.

ADDED: Eli Dourado argues that anonymity is the “real target”:
Contrary to some popular accounts, Bitcoin is not completely anonymous, but pseudonymous. The entire Bitcoin ledger is publicly shared so that the same coins can’t be spent twice. Bitcoin “mixers” take coins from multiple pseudonymous actors, shuffle them around, and return them to their original users under new pseudonyms. In other words, mixers help anonymize a system that is not truly anonymous.
If the government were to succeed in regulating mixers, it would not destroy Bitcoin as a payment mechanism or even hurt Bitcoin’s price, which has now reached an all-time high of $60, but it would ruin one of the chief advantages of using it—the quasi-anonymity that it affords.

ADDED: Meanwhile, in Europe …

In January, Moldbug spake prophetically:

Bitcoin dies in two very simple steps.

The charge: money laundering.

On May 15, Under the headline US Government Begins BitCoin Crackdown, Zero Hedge reported that:

Many people use Dwolla, a PayPal-like payment network, to send dollars to their Mt. Gox accounts. They then use those dollars to buy Bitcoins. On Tuesday, Dwolla announced that it had frozen Mt. Gox’s account at the request of federal investigators. It’s the first federal action against the currency.

And, by the way:

Sen. Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) described Bitcoin as an “online form of money laundering”

Outside in doesn’t share Moldbug’s BTC prediction, but the projected narratives don’t diverge much for some time. By attempting to stamp out Bitcoin, USG rapidly converts it into an overtly subversive revolutionary currency*, used only by those in explicit (though covert) antagonism to the regnant global economic regime. The test then begins.

*Typically, reactionaries don’t like revolutions, but that’s because revolutions are typically democratizing. When the neoreaction gets to watch a spontaneous right-wing revolution unfolding, against the democratized or ‘political’ economy, I suspect that they’ll quickly recover their natural sympathy for it.

ADDED: The greatness of Peter Thiel on display (via, and as anticipated)

Eli Dourado, author of the most important Bitcoin-inspired article on the web, remains publicly committed to the cryptocurrency’s future. In the wake of the Mt Gox crisis, affecting the world’s largest BTC exchange (based in Japan), he has written a brief defense of the bullish case in Nietzschean vein: what does not kill us makes us stronger.

In just four short paragraphs, Dourado manages to make a significant point. Stress-tested survival has a value. The more ferocious Bitcoin’s environment is shown to be, the more advantageous its competitive position relative to alternative cryptocurrencies, as its resilience is demonstrated and publicized. Actualization of potential (catastrophe) resolves risk, leaving whatever survives augmented by a security premium. “Now it turns out that getting a cryptocurrency ecosystem to grow up is really, really hard — harder than maybe we thought. It follows directly that Bitcoin faces less competition from other cryptocurrencies than we thought. … since it is hard to succeed, if Bitcoin succeeds, then it may be worth quite a lot.”

Dourado’s two links do more work still. The first is to a recent Megan McArdle pre-obituary on BTC, which argues that the reputational damage inflicted by the Mt Gox fiasco will weaken it still further in what was always a Quixotic challenge to State power:

I’ve never been very bullish on Bitcoin, because ultimately, the better it performs at evading government surveillance of currency transactions (and government ability to manage debt loads via inflation), the harder those governments are going to try to shut it down.

Governments like levying an invisible inflation tax, and get angry when people attempt to route around it. (This is all quite explicit, on both sides.) The balance of opportunities within this conflict is too intricate to detail here, but McArdle’s utter submissiveness to government exaction clearly represents an extreme position among commentators. That Bitcoin predictably infuriates state financial authorities is a feature, not a bug.

Dourado’s second link refers to an older and subtler argument by Tyler Cowen, which makes a bearish case against Bitcoin on strictly economic grounds. Insofar as Bitcoin is seen to flourish, competitor cryptocurrencies will be attracted into the market, arbitraging value down to the cost of supply:

There is thus a new theorem: the value of [any -it]Coin should, in equilibrium, be equal to the marketing costs of its potential competitors … In short, we are still in a situation where supply-side arbitrage has not worked its way through the value of Bitcoin. And that is one reason — among others — why I expect the value of Bitcoin to fall — a lot. [Cowen’s internal link is well worth following up.]

As already noted, Cowen’s bearish position is weakened by Bitcoin’s recent travails. Almost irrespective of what happens next, an established reputation for toughness will feature prominently in the market evaluation of any cryptocurrency from now on.

Since Bitcoin won’t have been killed — it is close to impossible to kill — it will have been made much stronger.

ADDED: Time for YellenCoin? (No.)

ADDED: “So is Mt. Gox the new version of Friendster, the early social networking leader that buckled just before Facebook surged ahead? … Bitcoin’s next generation of founders is cleaner, more pedigreed and suited to Wall Street’s and Capitol Hill’s tastes. They are no less libertarian or wolf-like.”

Does this look like something that’s about to die?

(This is among the few topics that puts my reverence for the Moldgod under serious strain.)

More here:

The apparently inverse relation between BTC value and investment level merits further commentary.

On a trivial personal note, I seem to have carelessly lost my Bitcoin wallet somehow, so my perfect detachment on the subject is even more impeccable than you might think.

Note: There’s a exemplary anti-Moldbug prognosis cited over at the other place. “The only extent to which the United States can allow anything at all with respect to Bitcoin is the extent to which it can reform itself to work inside Bitcoin.” OK, it’s perhaps an over-stretch in the opposite direction, but it still ends up far closer to the mark.

(Image source.)

ADDED: Found my Bitcoin account again — which I’m confident everyone will be extremely excited about. Better still, my BTC 0.0005 is still sitting there securely. Phew!

As the Bitcoin price takes a tumble, Heather R Morgan reminds us of her super-bearish article on the currency from February last year (with just a little gloating):

As #bitcoin plummets, I look back on the article I wrote a year ago about my predictions with a smirk. http://t.co/1lq0PpO4np #economics

— Heather R Morgan (@HeatherReyhan) January 14, 2015

It includes this valuable (abstract) hype-cycle chart:

Look carefully at what is happening in the final stages, though. I don’t think this chart is showing what Morgan takes it to. (AI, VR, Bitcoin — they all follow the same roller-coaster course, and they all get installed in the end.)

A Twitter comment worth noting:

I rarely see skepticism of #Bitcoin that is not more generally just skepticism of money. @Pierre_Rochard @prestonjbyrne @izakaminska

— Michael Goldstein (@Bitstein) January 14, 2015

ADDED: Jerry Brito is sensible on the topic.

The New Republic‘s somber account of the Bitcoin Gold Rush is well worth a read (despite the troweled-on axiomatic leftism). It includes this chart of the recent undulations in the Bitcoin price (in US Dirty fiat):

It’s a small chunk of history that could support any number of narratives at this point. This one, in particular, offers an alternative to terminal doom scenarios:

(Plenty of others seem to agree.)

Coinbase provides a graphic overview of 2015 Bitcoin trends, strikingly illustrating a structural disengagement of the cryptocurrency’s metrics as a medium of exchange and as a store of value:

While the price of bitcoin is down 9% year-to-date, if you look below the surface it is clear that Bitcoin had a strong first half and is making great strides as digital money for people around the world and a payment network for innovation. … […] The number of transactions per day on the Bitcoin network is rapidly accelerating. The network averaged 60,590 transactions per day in June 2014 and 117,474 transactions per day in June 2015. … That’s a 94% increase in monthly transactions over the past year.
[Emphasis in original.]

One obvious hypothesis — that Bitcoin hoarders are strategically restraining their holdings in order to facilitate the commercial spread of the currency — seems to assume an implausibly coherent solution to an intractable coordination (or collective action) problem. A more widely accepted Bitcoin has to be worth more, doesn’t it? It’s hard to see how everyone could be leaving that value on the pavement. (This blog is presently stumped.)

At least superficially, under-funding is the strict reciprocal of hype:

The blockchain industry is either hugely under-resourced or hugely over-optimistic. Probably both.

Bitcoin rigorously formalizes the common insight that words are cheap (it emerged out of spam-filter solutions). So this analysis is intriguingly ironic, as well as obviously thought-provoking.

Doug Henwood, writing in The Nation, explains the attractions of Bitcoin for the Right:

There have been many other reports of thefts, frauds and hackings, which Bitcoin partisans dismiss as mere growing pains. But with no regulator, no deposit insurance and no central bank, this sort of thing is inevitable — it’s just tough luck. Introduce regulators and insurance schemes, though, and Bitcoin will lose all its anarcho-charm.

Keynes once called gold “part of the apparatus of conservatism” for its appeal to rentiers who loved austerity because it preserved the value of their assets. Bitcoin serves a similarly totemic purpose for today’s cyber-libertarians, who love not only the statelessness of it as money, but also its power to subject the institutional banking system to “disruption” (one of the favorite words of that set). And like gold, Bitcoin is deflationary. There’s a limit on how many bitcoins can be produced, and it gets more difficult to produce them over time until that limit is reached. Of course, new cryptocurrencies could arise. But the existence of the limit reflects the deflationary sympathies of the libertarian mind — in a Bitcoin economy, creating money to ease an economic depression would be impossible. Which is not to say that only libertarians love Bitcoin.

Despite the careful signals of political distance, there’s nothing off-track on the substance. In the subsequent paragraphs Henwood excavates a little deeper, while preserving the same balanced openness to information. He even — momentarily — passes the ultimate Rightist clue-test by collapsing epistemology down into the market: “Bitcoin is not without friends on Wall Street. Gil Luria of Wedbush Securities is following it; he describes the recent volatility as ‘extended price discovery,’ which is a way of saying that no one knows what it is, what it will be or what it’s worth. His firm is selling his Bitcoin research for payment in bitcoins.”

His unexpected discovery, however, is a Left Bitcoin constituency, drawn to it by the same priorities that can make ‘libertarianism’ so ideologically-slippery as a category, most obviously: the potential for “evasion of state surveillance and policing — which, in the post-Snowden era, is nothing to sneeze at.” While rummaging for story-snippets at a New York Bitcoin ‘party’, he is delighted to run into ‘Mistress Magpie’:

A Marxist-feminist professional dominatrix who practices in Britain … [and] an enthusiastic Bitcoin proponent. She explains her enthusiasm as beginning with her deep techno-geekiness, and adds that Bitcoin is also practical for someone in her line of work — anonymity is important, whether operating in real life or online. Unlike libertarians, who see cryptocurrencies as a possible gateway to a new society, the socialist in Mistress Magpie sees them as a way to operate furtively under capitalism, in a way that might not be needed in a more open socialist society.

While it’s superficially tempting to make fun of such socialism with anarcho-capitalist characteristics, it sparkles in comparison to the dismal defense of state fiat money authority with which Henwood — dutifully — concludes the article.

Writing in E-International Relations, Brett Scott raises Left critique of the blockchain revolution to a stimulating level of theoretical sophistication. His central argument is important: Blockchain cryptosystems are the technological realization of the “dystopian, conservative” impulse — first crystallized by Thomas Hobbes — to establish a politically-immunized sovereignty. This social model, previously subverted by the fallible humanity of leaders, is finally becoming attainable as algorithmic government, Scott’s Techno-Leviathan.

Conservative libertarians hold tight to the belief that, if only hard property rights and clear contracting rules are put in place, optimal systems spontaneously emerge. They are not actually that far from Hobbes in this regard, but their irritation with Hobbes’ vision is that it relies on politicians who, being actual people, do not act like a detached contractual Sovereign should, but rather attempt to meddle, make things better, or steal. Don’t decentralised blockchains offer the ultimate prospect of protected property rights with clear rules, but without the political interference?

Scott navigates the Ideological Turing Test well enough to become a landmark reference in future discussions. His opponents will no doubt in many cases concede (as this blog does) that the ‘dystopia’ he describes, while portrayed in ominous and mournful tones, captures the attachments — and dis-attachments — of zealous blockchain promoters remarkably well.

Scott clearly thinks political trust is a social good that can be re-built or recovered (perhaps by restarting democracy). Even if this is so, the time remaining for the salvage operation is running out fast.

Blockchain schizophrenia is reaching criticality:

So we find ourselves in the Bitcoin “missile crisis,” and uncomfortable ironies abound. The decentralized currency is beset by centralizing pressures if it changes or if it doesn’t. The apolitical currency is being rent by a deeply political rift between camps, each of which purports to be the trusted authority over the trustless, anti-authoritarian currency.

No one ever said anarchistic collective decision-making was going to be easy.

(Via.)

This tweet storm is pure evil (but fortunately we’re fairly tolerant of such things at this blog).

The point it raises is going to fuel an important argument, down the road. Better to explore it via an appropriately constructed altcoin, and in the market, though, than to wreck Bitcoin in the course of the dialectic. Hard money philosophy is baked into the Bitcoin protocol. If that doesn’t seem like a good idea, the solution is to try something else.

Bitcoin had a good 2015, at least according to investor estimations. Already, half-way through January, the all-consuming chaos of 2016 has rolled over it.

The Bitcoin block-size spat that rumbled inconclusively throughout the previous year has escalated into a dramatic public row, with core developer Mike Hearn’s noisy exit. His text is an instant classic for the historical record, regardless of how persuasive its argument is found. The discussion at Reddit provides some sense of the controversy.

Hearn is writing Bitcoin off as a “failed experiment” — which seems histrionic, despite the many points of interest he raises. The deep tension between its security principles and its (near-term) growth prospects is a matter of evident seriousness. Taking the monkey business out of money innovation won’t be as easy as some of the crypto-currency’s more optimistic proponents had anticipated. Something of extreme historical radicality is occurring, and it’s going to be messy.

With much of the world going under in 2016, there’s likely to be a scramble for the escape capsule — and that seems to be on fire.

ADDED: Bitcoin obituaries through the ages.

This is a joke, but it’s also onto something serious:

Satoshi Nakamoto is the NSA.

Hope you all realize that.

— Grim Dark Future Hat (@ClarkHat) February 17, 2016

A cryptocurrency that maintains a perfect log of every single transaction, and which can be controlled by the party with the most CPUs.

— Grim Dark Future Hat (@ClarkHat) February 17, 2016

And best of all, the creator has maintained 100% opsec since releasing his paper.

— Grim Dark Future Hat (@ClarkHat) February 17, 2016

In my eternally on-the-way Bitcoin book, the point is raised like this:

While the governmental response to Bitcoin is doubtless guided by a strategy (or in fact multiple strategies) of capture, this does not reduce to an agenda of public regulation, still less suppression, but also includes cooptation in accordance with deep state functions, as well as the private interests of state agents. Insofar as every real state includes a ‘deep’ or sub-public aspect, it will inevitably relate ambiguously to the emergence of elusive social capabilities, although this ambiguity will be only minimally reflected in its public relations. The empowering of private agents to evade state scrutiny and regulation represents a manifest erosion of government or ‘public’ authority, and is liable to be denounced on those grounds (if not transparently in those terms). Yet the crypto-secure transaction systems responsible for such governance complications are also opportunities for covert action, and are therefore to be counted as virtual assets. The novel functions introduced by Bitcoin tend to the exacerbation – or sophistication – of agency problems.

The politics of Bitcoin can be expected, eventually, to catalyze a multitude of obscure metamorphoses in the nature of the state. If the distinct but overlapping occult fields of clandestine security functions and resilient sub-public interests are bundled into a provisional concept of the dark state, it can be quite confidently predicted that the balance of attraction and repulsion between such elements and crypto-currency will be highly asymmetric with respect to public communication. As a corollary, it is realistic to assume that the openly stated position of public authorities in regards to crypto-channels of all kinds, very much including Bitcoin, will be systematically misleading, in a negative direction. Bitcoin tends to empower the invisible, and to disempower the visible.

An event on the cryptic plane is not to be confused with its public presentation. Even if the NSA did not create Bitcoin (and — like Clark — I seriously doubt that it did), it’s unlikely that it would be distraught about the discreet rumor that it had.

Under the compulsion of formality, complex legal-administrative codes have no option but to make space for the future.

FinCEN’s crucial (and still incompletely digested) guidance note on virtual currencies, issued March 18, 2013, clarifies in a footnote (#2):

FinCEN’s regulations define “person” as “an individual, a corporation, a partnership, a trust or estate, a joint stock company, an association, a syndicate, joint venture, or other unincorporated organization or group, an Indian Tribe (as that term is defined in the Indian Gaming Regulatory Act), and all entities cognizable as legal personalities.”

There’s plenty of room already for almost anything to slither in. (Follow the DAO.)

XS has received a firm (but fair) scolding for not linking to this development in yesterday’s Chaos Patch (or elsewhere).

Here’s the website and a nested blogpost (containing a deeper link to the whitepaper (which is good)). The (minimalistic) manifesto is an ideological mish-mash which has been worked-over by PR imperatives and demands cold scrutiny to extract its real content.

From the whitepaper:

A word of caution, at the outset: the legal status of DAOs remains the subject of active and vigorous debate and discussion. Not everyone shares the same definition. Some have said that they are autonomous code and can operate independently of legal systems; others have said that they must be owned or operate by humans or human created entities. There will be many uses cases, and the DAO code will develop over time. Ultimately, how a DAO functions and its legal status will depend on many factors, including how DAO code is used, where it is used, and who uses it. This paper does not speculate about the legal status of DAOs worldwide.

The XS prediction is itself predictable: This only goes in one direction (and eventually its going to be vast).

ADDED: When the marketing aesthetics go in this direction, we’re done.

ADDED: Andrea Castillo comments.

I, for one, welcome our new species of robber baron overlords (non-ironically):

I have carefully examined the code of The DAO and decided to participate after finding the feature where splitting is rewarded with additional ether. I have made use of this feature and have rightfully claimed 3,641,694 ether, and would like to thank the DAO for this reward. It is my understanding that the DAO code contains this feature to promote decentralization and encourage the creation of “child DAOs”.

I am disappointed by those who are characterizing the use of this intentional feature as “theft”. I am making use of this explicitly coded feature as per the smart contract terms and my law firm has advised me that my action is fully compliant with United States criminal and tort law. For reference please review the terms of the DAO …

(Learning is hard.)

Bloomberg commentary.

The reddit FAQ.

There’s a lot going on here:

Do you ever feel like you’re using the Internet as a modem? […] The Internet is actually an awesome modem. The online services blow AOL away. But are we really that far from 1995? […] Can we re-decentralize the Internet? A lot of great hackers have tried. Maybe we can’t? Maybe it’s just impossible? […] The Internet isn’t from 1995. It’s from 1975. In 1995, we learned that a network beats a mainframe. Now, we’ve learned that a 2015 mainframe beats a 1975 network. […] Does it beat a 2015 network? What is a 2015 network, anyway? […] If the Internet beats a modem, and a modem on top of the Internet beats the Internet — what if we made an Internet on top of the Internet? […] These questions seemed interesting. So we built Urbit.

The Urbit whitepaper (with links to (arcane) demos).

The Hacker News discussion starts off sophomoric, but gets better.

Best promo slogan I’ve seen yet (from this, last year): “If Bitcoin is money, Urbit is land.” It’s the algorithmic propertarian matrix for virtual real-estate.

The technical competence required to evaluate this (MegaNet) initiative far exceeds my capabilities (that’s what you lot are for).

(a) If doable, it’s huge.
(b) It seems to follow the grain of The Process (and cross-link not only to Bitcoin, but also to Urbit).

According to Kim Dotcom, the key to a safer, more secure and decentralized Internet will lie within blockchain technology, or a version of Bitcoin’s original concept. He has spent two years working on the program, and basically turning the Internet into a encrypted, decentralized smartphone app. In general terms, here’s how it works: […] “If you have 100 million smartphones that have the MegaNet app installed, we’ll have more online storage capacity, bandwidth and calculating power than the top 10 largest websites in the world combined,” Dotcom claims. “Over the years with these new devices and capacity, especially mobile bandwidth capacity, there will be no limitations. We are going to use very long keys, systems that will not be reverse engineered or cracked by any supercomputer. […] … Dotcom says it will use a faster version of blockchain technology to exchange data globally. There will be no IP addresses within MegaNet, like the current Internet IpV4 protocol uses for enhanced user security. Yet, it will use the current Internet protocol initially as a “dumb pipe” to get the ball rolling. He and his staff are working on a new type of encryption that will work regardless of how MegaNet is accessed. Bandwidth would come from Wi-Fi use and when the phone is idle, so no charges would come through an IP.

Another source.

Pirate credentials.

In case XS hasn’t put out an all-in ‘It’s going to be huge’ announcement on this yet, it’s past time to do so. (More at Amazon.)

A critical piece of the near-future Internet just crystallized.

Nelson’s vision incremented into actuality by another step thanks to 21.co. It’s focused on the core constituency at the moment, situated in the intersection of coders with 21 Bitcoin Computers, but it looks like a significant beta version of something much bigger.

Marketplaces and currencies tend to go well together. Paypal famously got to scale by becoming the currency of choice for eBay buyers and sellers. The US dollar grew to its current international predominance in part on the back of the large, integrated US market. And it thus stands to reason that a digital currency like Bitcoin might be well suited for a digital marketplace based on Bitcoin. […] But the exact nature of the products being sold in such a marketplace is important. Unlike a traditional physical market localized to a nation state, the digital currency community is dispersed around the world. Moreover, most users hold relatively small balances, especially relative to their reserves of fiat currency. Finally, the community has a disproportionate share of engineers and computer scientists relative to the general world population. […] Taking these constraints into account, we’ve built what we think of as the first micropayments marketplace: a marketplace that allows buyers and sellers to trade in digital goods using micropayments, initially specifically focused on APIs for developer use.

(Forward links included at the source.)

Ping21 latches it to the Internet of Things (brief commentary at CoinDesk). Plus, more bitcoin market innovation.

A series of professional writing obligations have taken me to Xinjiang three times this year, and the single strongest impression from these trips has been the centrality of Silk Road heritage. Regardless of borders, ethnicities, and controversies, the Silk Road is the reason everyone is there, and the thing that has always come first. Derivatively, transport infrastructure connects settlements together, but primarily it is the great ancient thoroughfare that has deposited areas of habitation along its vast — and harsh — middle stretches, as if provisioning itself with the archaic equivalent of gas stations and traffic police outposts, distributed in whatever frequency necessary to hold open the road.

China is not very adept at international PR, and Xinjiang coverage in world media tends to be critical. This has resulted in a predictable touchiness, and even though the most cursory historical examination already shows that Han Chinese have a profound ancient presence in the area, no opportunity is missed to underscore this point still further. These efforts range from the genuinely illuminating to the comically incompetent. One especially interesting species of evidence, falling somewhere between these extremes — and passing between them at an odd angle — is coinage. Repeatedly I was told by museum curators and historical experts, always with the greatest earnestness, that the abundance of Imperial Chinese currency found in the area was an unambiguous indicator of demographic integrity and Han settlement. Certainly, Xinjiang is a numismatist’s paradise, even if these tangible commercial signs are dragged into stories they cannot confidently tell.

Coins have little affinity with settlement. ‘Portability’ is always counted among the essential features demanded of money, because its function is to circulate, or travel. Like droplets swept along by the currents of commerce, the coins of Xinjiang belong to the road before they belong to the place, eloquent about transactions, but mute about territories. They tell of flows, and passages, but when the topic turns to political geography, they fall dumb. What does commercial traffic care for boundaries and homelands? — Only what it is coerced into caring about, whether by toll barriers, or by uncontrolled bandits.

China was drawn into its Far West, well over two millennia ago, as the guardian of the Silk Road. It was legitimated as regional hegemon by its administrative capability and cultural cohesion. Apparently, in the present age of ethno-nationalist border squabbling and territorial irritability, recognizing this indisputable fact is either too much, or not enough.

Up until recently, Bitcoin was associated with a different Silk Road — although arguably not a very different one. As a partially-anonymized cryptocurrency, fundamentally immunized against political interference of any kind, it was naturally affiliated with the anarcho-capitalist markets of the ‘dark web’. The closure of this Internet Silk Road in early October propelled Bitcoin into a new phase of existence, as Tech Crunch explains:

Bitcoin’s recent price surge also comes after a 15% drop last month, following the FBI seizure of the underground ‘black market’ marketplace Silk Road — where billions worth in Bitcoin had been used to purchase various illegal goods and services since Silk Road was set up. The closure of the service blew a hole in Bitcoin’s valuation — but clearly only a temporary one. Bitcoin quickly recovered the lost value, and has since gone on this latest surge.

The removal of one of the most notorious pipelines linking Bitcoin to the buying and selling of narcotics and other illegal goods and services may actually have helped the cryptocurrency — by improving its reputation and thereby boosting its mainstream appeal.

Bitcoin supports near-anonymous transactions, which encouraged its use on Silk Road. But the cryptocurrency has many other characteristics that potentially make it interesting to a much more mainstream user-base — such as the fact transactions are irreversible, something of potential interest to online retailers wanting to avoid the hassle of chargebacks.

With the artificial Silk Road shuttered, Bitcoin was quickly plugged into the original. Less than two weeks after the FBI operation, China’s Internet giant Baidu announced that it would begin to accept Bitcoins. Whilst an obvious threshold event, this decision was also the confirmation of powerful pre-existing trends, which had raised the level of Chinese interest in the currency to the second highest in the world (after only the United States). For Chinese savers, trapped between negative real return RMB bank accounts and irrationally exuberant real estate markets, the prospects of Bitcoin as a speculative store of value can easily seem attractive. (A parallel rise in both private and public gold holdings reinforces this impression.)

The most radical interpretation of these developments, however, would connect them to intimations of a “de-Americanized world”. For American Bitcoin users, in particular, the currency is already embraced as a way to short the US dollar, and to practically express disgust at the global fiat money regime. Mere days before the Baidu decision, a commentary on Xinhuanet  suggested:

What may also be included as a key part of an effective [global financial] reform is the introduction of a new international reserve currency that is to be created to replace the dominant U.S. dollar, so that the international community could permanently stay away from the spillover of the intensifying domestic political turmoil in the United States.

That sounds like history in the making.

Simon Black’s comparison of US (official) and East Asian attitudes to Bitcoin speaks for itself:

Places like Hong Kong and Singapore understand that they have a role to play as preeminent international financial centers in becoming financial hubs for digital currencies.

If the US wants to shoot itself in the foot (again) and shut itself out of the market, so be it. But Asia is embracing its potential role in the marketplace, complete with all the risks and rewards.

It wasn’t but a few weeks ago that a Hong Kong-based bitcoin exchange ran off with a few million dollars of customer money. But that hasn’t cooled demand in the region… nor has it sparked a wave of debilitating regulations to clamp down on digital currencies.

What this ultimately means is that all the new businesses and intellectual capital associated with digital currencies will flock to Asia… just in the same way that all the cutting edge precious metals firms are now basing themselves in Singapore.

ADDED: “The U.S. government believes that some scary people are using bitcoin. But here’s another scary prospect: If the government goes overboard with a hard-line approach on bitcoin and other emerging digital currencies, it may merely push them overseas, where they will surely flourish outside of its control.”

Gordon Chang is a writer who finds it hard to maintain his balance on China topics, but his overview discussion of Bitcoin in the Middle Kingdom is not to be missed.

The world isn’t cooperating with those who want to think about one thing at a time:

In a report out today from Goldman Sachs about the future of money, the bank points out that 80% of bitcoin volume is now exchanged into and out of Chinese yuan. The second-highest trading currency is the US dollar, followed by smaller denominations in yen and euros.

The fate of Bitcoin is inextricable from that of the global monetary order, and coming at it from that direction is increasingly unavoidable.

ADDED: Cryptocoins News comments.

… there are no doubt a number. One that stands out for its conceptual clarity, however, is the Triffin Dilemma. Formulated by Robert Triffin and publicized in testimony to the US Congress in 1960, it builds upon the simple arithmetical necessity that any country whose currency is privileged with world reserve status is compelled to run chronic trade deficits, in order to supply global monetary liquidity. World economic hegemony is therefore inseparable from a loss of control over domestic monetary policy — since measures that might be required to support the value of the currency would commonly be inconsistent with the responsibility to export money (through a negative current account balance).

‘Chimerica‘ is the Triffin Dilemma exemplified in convenient binary form. On the one hand, economic leadership and the ‘exorbitant privilege’ of seigniorage (through which mere financial signs are swapped for substantial products and services), on the other economic policy dysfunction and de-industrialization, as American business activity is outsourced to China is exchange for symbolic monetary dominance. In this process, and paradox of power, the current instantiation of world order is captured in its essentials. The way modernity presently and concretely works cannot be made intelligible without reference to Triffin.

The strong implication of the Triffin Dilemma — perhaps even ‘Triffin Paradox’ — is that global currency hegemony is ultimately ruinous for the financially sovereign nation. It involves something akin to an economic analog or variant of Paul Virilio’s ‘endo-colonization’ which “happens when a political power turns against its own people” progressing smoothly from predation to auto-cannibalization. The ‘exorbitant privilege’ of accessing real resources in exchange for mere promissory paper is maintained only at the cost of an absolute outsourcing — an international division of labor in which the master is compelled to specialize in financial signs, submitting to an accelerating atrophy of productive capability. An international reserve currency is therefore self-hollowing, in a vicious causal loop that substitutes pure political prowess — symbolic prestige — for the industrial advantages which originally promoted it. The culture it imposes accentuates consumerism, financial politicization, and hysterical sensitivity to the vicissitudes of signs. In the end, only the magic of power remains.

The way out of this deteriorating structure has long been envisaged as a politically-managed international currency, whether the Keynesian ‘bancor’, or the IMF’s SDRs (Special Drawing Rights). The call such a scheme makes upon coherent international governance has reliably exceeded diplomatic and political practicality. It is notable, however, that a certain globalist fantasy is predictably generated by the stresses of currency hegemony, irrespective of all prior or ulterior ideological commitments.

If US Dollar hegemony is unsustainable, and globalist remedies are realistically inaccessible, the world economic order has a catastrophic horizon. Crucially: with currency hegemony now understood as a trap, no sane national regime can be expected to advance itself as the next America. Whatever waits beyond the magic show has to be something new. It is under these conditions that — ‘coincidentally’ — the first post-national and radically depoliticized digital crypto-currencies have begun to appear upon the world stage …

The mere fact this conversation is even happening has to be disturbing to some extremely powerful global interests. BTC volatility appears to be the only major obstacle to the cryptocurrency’s widespread international adoption at this point. If it trends downwards, a switch point will be suggested on the horizon. In the interim, the BTC option sets implicit limits to USD devaluation — the cost of volatility isn’t infinite.

The article expects China to oppose any move to price oil in BTC in global markets, based on ambitions for an expanded international use of the RMB. Given what Chinese monetary authorities know about the Triffin dilemma, this is an argument that can very easily be over-stretched.

Outside in is preparing an open letter to the government of the PRC, recommending the creation of a Bitcoin clone. The state-level incentive for such an initiative would be to refashion the global financial order in preparation for the ending of US Dollar status as the world reserve currency. It does not seem difficult to present this as a matter of clear Chinese national interest, with definite spin-off benefits to the country’s political and economic elites, its ordinary savers, and supporters of economic freedom worldwide.

Sinocoin (to use its English name), would be released by the PBoC, and then — like BitCoin — be irretrievably autonomous. The Sinocoin algorithm would be a perfect Bitcoin clone, assuming (realistically) that the PRC government would not be inclined to upgrade it with strengthened user anonymity patches. However, PBoC reserves could be used, in accordance with a publicly announced policy, to sustain a floor valuation for the currency in its initial stages. Limited controls on RMB / Sinocoin exchange might provide a longer range mechanism for the suppression of Sinocoin volatility.

Sinocoin would be a complementary initiative to Bitcoin, designed to avoid the disruptive effects that large-scale Chinese forex interventions would have on the latter currency. Bitcoin / Sinocoin exchange rates would provide a valuable index of Chinese financial integration into the emerging (Modernity 2.0) global economy. Parity is to be considered the ultimate natural equilibrium (with Sinocoin outperforming Bitcoin during its early decades).

If anybody has suggestions to make about the technical, economic, or political implications of such a development, they can be discussed here, and carefully considered prior to drafting the proposal. Unless specifically requested, contributor information will not be willingly passed on to either Chinese or US financial authorities or intelligence services.

The completed series on ‘China, Crypto-Currency, and the World Order’ is up at the WDW Review:

Part-1: Tribute and Tribulations
Part-2: Digital Denominations
Part-3: Clone Wars

It was written is sequence, so the overall structure could have been tightened (in retrospect). Without external disciples — or at least its interiorized simulcrum — it would probably have been extended to five parts, or more.

The first part already contains the most pronounced conclusion. The emergence of blockchain-based monetary systems intersects with the geopolitics of world currencies, and will inevitably modulate their deep historical rhythms. The RMB is less likely to become the central world reserve currency in the blockchain-epoch, principally because this status is a poisoned chalice, subtracting effective economic control even as it cements nominal dominance.

Despite superficial political reservations, and some characteristic patience (even inscrutability), the China factor is almost certain to advance the introduction of the decentralized public ledger commercium, which will organize the next-stage future of the global economy. None of these claims strike me as seriously controversial.

Issuing countries of reserve currencies are constantly confronted with the dilemma between achieving their domestic monetary policy goals and meeting other countries’ demand for reserve currencies. […] The Triffin Dilemma, i.e., the issuing countries of reserve currencies cannot maintain the value of the reserve currencies while providing liquidity to the world, still exists. —Zhou Xiaochuan

What the technologies of steam power were to the epoch of British global dominance, and the twin-track developments of electricity and the automobile to the subsequent American Age, digital electronics—and, more specifically, the Internet—are to the “rise of China” and the refashioned world it epitomizes. It is only to be expected, therefore, that the intersection of the post-1979 Open-and-Reformed New China with the post-1990 World Wide Web-enabled Internet should be an object of particular international fascination, and practical concern.

From the dawn of the modern epoch, geopolitical hegemony has been associated ever more intensely with techno-economic leadership, which has in turn been reflected in the international reserve status of a select national currency. An ever more explicitly formalized world monetary order has converted compelling but obscure intuitions of relative national prestige into an unambiguous system of financial relationships, in which a position of supremacy is clearly established, with a definite and singular role.

The suspicions fostered by leadership are no less inevitable than leadership itself. For easily intelligible historical reasons, the French policy establishment has been an especially vociferous critic of international reserve status and its “exorbitant privilege”^[1] of seigniorage—the spontaneous ‘right’ to issue promissory paper in exchange for real goods and services, without any definite prospect of redemption. There can be little doubt that such criticism articulates concerns widely held beyond the Anglophone world, and its substance deserves serious examination.

Of the indispensable building blocks constructing the near future, China and the Internet have special prominence. There are innumerable places where China meets the Web, beginning with the sprawling, multidimensional, and explosively growing Chinese Internet itself. Bitcoin is a recent and still relatively slender thread in the tapestry of global change, but by tugging at it, some central features of the emerging world can be pulled into focus.

Among the characteristics that the Chinese yuan and bitcoin share is that neither is the US dollar. Specifically, both are limited yet practical alternatives to the dollar, at least at the level of microeconomic decision-making. When questions are raised about the durability of the dollar’s international role, it can be predicted with confidence that one or both of these challengers will be invoked. For the dollar to die of ice or fire is, today, for it to succumb to geopolitical substitution (by the Chinese yuan) or techno-financial obsolescence (by some decentralized, Internet-based crypto-currency).

The international status of the US dollar concentrates two multi-century trends. Firstly, it represents the ethno-geographical peculiarity of modernity, which—up to the late twentieth century at least—tended to slant global power not only toward the West or Occident, but more specifically toward the Atlantic Anglophone nations, ultimately gathered under American leadership. Since the decline of the Spanish dollar, which monetized the treasure of the New World as the first global currency, international finance has been principally denominated in the currency of an English-speaking nation. Non-coincidentally, it has thus been tightly associated with a set of particular cultural themes, including (Philo-Semitic) Protestant Christianity, the invisible hand, free trade, and liberal democracy. The institutionalization of world finance has been intimately connected with the promotion of a distinct—and for many a distinctly questionable—cultural orientation.

Secondly, the formalization of a global monetary order has been accompanied by an incremental politicization of money, which is to say, by the consolidation of monetary policy as a core function of government. With the establishment of central banking and the demetallization of currency, intrinsic scarcity is replaced by an institutional “promise to pay” that converts money from a tangible asset into a contractual liability. Public confidence in the value of money is turned into a governmental responsibility. It becomes political, and—in the context of a world reserve currency—geopolitical.

In combination, these trends are inevitably provocative, since they concentrate the world’s financial destiny in selected, identifiably non-representative hands. Behind the studied neutrality of the Bretton Woods institutions (the IMF and the World Bank) stands the US dollar as the symbol of American exception and the concrete peculiarity of the modern world order.

While it is natural—and even inevitable—for political command of the global reserve currency to be understood as the modern capstone of geopolitical hegemony, it is not a privilege separable from testing responsibilities, or from profound ambiguities. These have been clearly recognized since the 1960s, when Belgian-American economist Robert Triffin formulated the paradox or dilemma that bears his name: that if foreign governments are to accumulate reserves in one selected nation’s currency, that nation must necessarily be a net exporter of money—which can be achieved only by running a negative balance of trade. A nation issuing international reserve currency assumes responsibility for global monetary liquidity. This obliges it to consume more than it produces, in order for the difference to be made available as world money. While this requirement is merely seigniorage, seen from the other side, the constraint it imposes upon domestic economic policy options are so strict they amount almost to a destiny.

These constraints are turned into a destructive dilemma by the fact that the mandatory policy structure required to supply the world with liquidity tends to destroy confidence in the currency at the same time, therefore undermining its value. Chronic balance of payments deficits signal currency weakness, since they would normally be interpreted as a sign that a currency is over-valued (or in need of devaluation). For the issuer of a global reserve currency, however, conventional policy responses to this situation are blocked in both directions, since it can neither take measures to close the deficit, nor attempt to strengthen the currency through elevating interest rates. Because for the reserve currency issuer the trade deficit is a constant, rather than a variable, a devaluation merely incites competitive currency destruction worldwide. Strengthening measures, on the other hand, draw in money from abroad (denominated in the international currency) and thus further expand the demand for issuance, which can only be satisfied by a widening of the trade deficit.

In other words, the Triffin Dilemma recognizes that international demand for a reserve currency is inherently paradoxical. What is sought is the currency as it would be were it not supplied through chronic trade imbalances, yet these same imbalances are the only channel through which it can in fact be supplied.

“Chimerica” perfectly exemplifies the essentials of the situation. China’s two trillion US dollars of reserves correspond to a cumulative balance of payments surplus of precisely the same sum, since this is simply what the reserves are. When perceived appreciatively—which was far easier in the final decades of the twentieth century than in the early decades of the twenty-first century—Chimerica has been a complementary economic arrangement through which America achieved high levels of consumption coupled with restrained price inflation, while China realized export-oriented economic development and the break-out modernization that had eluded it for 150 years. To more jaundiced eyes, the same arrangement is a trap that has married American de-industrialization to Chinese environmental devastation, while fueling unsustainable fiscal incontinence in America and a Chinese investment bubble. Whichever picture has greater realism, it can probably be safely concluded that the dissymmetry imposed by an international reserve currency has far-reaching and ambiguous consequences.

Cynically, it might be argued that the tributary aspect of reserve currency status is perfectly matched to deep Chinese traditions in international relations, so that an ascent to yuan-based exorbitant privilege would make a natural geopolitical goal for the Middle Kingdom, as it restored its central position in the world. More realistic however—at least in the near term—is a recognition that loss of domestic economic policy control is an inevitable, and well-understood, consequence of global currency hegemony, and it is one the Chinese government is certain to find unacceptable. Whatever the costs (primarily environmental) associated with the role of “workshop to the world” they are immensely outweighed, from the Chinese perspective, by the advantages. It is on the tributary side of the international reserve currency ledger, where China has been for over four decades, that all crucial vectors of development are to be found—technological absorption, infrastructural deepening, industrialization, urbanization, employment, and even military capability.

If Chimerica is breaking down, it has far less to do with any kind of Chinese challenge—even a spontaneous and unintended one—than with a tragic structure inherent to currency hegemony. As hubris leads to nemesis, so does exorbitant monetary privilege lead to crisis, and even ruin. In both the Spanish and British precedents, financial supremacy became self-defeating, because exporting money (rather than things) differentially advantaged industrial competitors, locking in secular social decline. There is no compelling reason to believe that America has exempted itself from the same ominous pattern.

On 29 March 2009, in the wake of the financial crisis, Zhou Xiaochuan, governor of the People's Bank of China, delivered an important speech entitled “Reform the International Monetary System.” He explicitly referred to the Triffin Dilemma as the key to understanding the world’s economic instability, while suggesting that a shift beyond US dollar hegemony would ultimately be required to remedy it. In this respect, his words conformed to a tradition dating back over half a century, to the Bretton Woods negotiations, when John Maynard Keynes recommended the introduction of a neutral global monetary medium—to be called the bancor—making the supply of global liquidity independent of national currencies.

Historically, international reserve currencies have not arisen by design. It might be argued, therefore, that the Keynesian bancor was an unrealistic technocratic fix, blind to the spontaneous momentum that had already made a non-negotiable fact of the dollarized world, even before the Bretton Woods proceedings began. This did not prevent the same basic idea re-emerging in different guises, the most prominent of which has been the IMF’s SDRs (Special Drawing Rights), regularly proposed as a neutral international currency in embryo. It was still to SDRs that Zhou turned when searching out a candidate for a neutral world currency.

Perhaps some technocratic solution to the problem of monetary hegemony will ultimately be found, but if so it would mark an unprecedented departure from world financial history. If, as has always been the case to date, economic tides beyond policy control are to determine such outcomes, it is understandable that attention should drift toward the Chinese yuan as an eventual substitute for the US dollar. Yet the lessons of history are available to policymakers, even when the most insistent lesson concerns limitations upon their own influence, and in this case the foremost of these is that the prospect of an international reserve status yuan presents China with a poisoned chalice. It is very unlikely to be accepted willingly.

Might some alternative spontaneous evolution in the nature of money take this critical geopolitical dilemma in a new direction? Such an evolution appears to be occurring, symbolized by bitcoin, history’s first example of a decentralized digital crypto-currency. For China, bitcoin—or something comparable to it—could be the only way to evade an assumption of global economic privilege whose essence is ruinous hubris.

Like James Frazer’s sacred king, who is crowned in order to be sacrificed, the inner meaning of monetary hegemony is economic and social destruction. China quite clearly understands this, and as the dollar era comes to a close, it is looking for a way out. That is how the China-bitcoin story really begins.

^[1]Coined by Valéry Giscard d'Estaing, during his service as French minister of finance in the 1960s. See: http://www.j-bradford-delong.net/movable_type/2005-3_archives/000397.html (accessed 29 April 2014).

I have a lot of friends who are programmers. The programmers have always gone like, “Those [Bitcoin] guys are crazy.”

And then, almost 100 percent of the time, they sit down, read the paper, read the code—it takes them a couple weeks—and they come out the other side. And they’re like: “Oh my god, this is it. This is the big breakthrough. This is the thing we’ve been waiting for. He solved all the problems. Whoever he is should get the Nobel Prize—he’s a genius. This is the thing! This is the distributed trust network that the Internet always needed and never had.”

So, one of the challenges is you take people who aren’t professional programmers or mathematicians and then you expect them to understand it from a standing start. And it’s daunting. And so then it gets a word attached to it, like ‘currency’ or whatever you want to call it, and then people think that it is something it isn’t. And you have a sense of this, but it’s a much deeper concept than currency. It’s the idea of distributed trust.

—Marc Andreessen (in conversation with Brian Fung)

It was noted in the first part of this essay series that the economic order of the world is being radically reshaped by two roughly coincidental transformations of stupendous consequence: a secular shift of industrial capability from the West toward the East, and an Internet-based revolution in the nature of money. Of these events, the former is already deeply established, and generally recognized, while the latter is still at an initial stage of emergence, and thus far less obvious in its implications. Their intersection remains deeply obscure.

One topic that seems, tantalizingly, to connect these historical threads is the prospective death—or at least radical demotion—of the US dollar. The Triffin Dilemma argues that any currency attaining world reserve status tends, perhaps irresistibly, to destroy itself.^[1] America’s relative economic decline looks set to exacerbate the ‘winter’ of this great cycle. From the other side, the dollar is threatened by the piecemeal emergence of an entirely unprecedented non-state currency system, disengaged from all the familiar institutions of monetary management. At the historical horizon of the globalized US dollar, the Chinese yuan and bitcoin are hazily gathered together.

Abstractly anticipated, this twin-threat integrates into a single event of compounded significance, but concrete forecasting can easily become lost in its novel complexities. For roughly half a millennium, transitions in world economic leadership have been smoothed by cultural affinity and intimate strategic collaboration, within a commercial Protestant tradition that has shared a common language, and common enemies, since the late eighteenth century.^[2] Nothing comparable is conceivable today, as American global supremacy erodes in a context of intense strategic competition and pronounced civilizational difference.

Inside one of the warehouses on Iceland are mining rigs by Cointerra, KnCMiner and recently arrived spondoolies-tech. These rigs stacked high clearly tell that bitcoin mining is now a professional endeavour and students mining entire bitcoins in their dorm are soon to be a thing of the past. Cloudhashing is set to expand its operations. Source: cryptocoinsnews.com. All rights reserved.

Relative to the passage from the pound sterling to the US dollar, systematic adoption of the Chinese yuan would require “crossing the great ocean”—an expedition so daunting it is unlikely, in any straightforward sense, to take place. Superficially, digital cryptocurrencies are set at an even more distant remove, alien even to those commonalities that span the gulf between civilizations. Yet they are positively advanced by proximity to the world’s looming monetary precipice, because they represent a solution to the absence of trust.

The word “bitcoin” stands for two very different things (although one contains the other). In its narrow and exact usage it names a specific currency, abbreviated as BTC, incarnating a radically innovative monetary system whose design was fully specified in Satoshi Nakamoto’s 2008 “Bitcoin” paper.^[3] The currency became operational in 2009.

The 2008 paper is both a practical invention and a substantial contribution to the philosophy of money. Its central insight is that money functions as a rationing system, acquiring value or application to tradable goods and services through a scarcity function. If digital money is to realize this function, it has two interconnected problems to solve. It has to be intrinsically limited, and it has to be exclusively alienable.

Bitcoin solves the first of these problems by emulating a precious metal. It is earned through a process of mining that requires cryptographic work, in order to access bitcoins from a finite ‘reserve’, released in stages, amounting in total to 21 million BTC. Preserving the finitude of this bitcoin money stock depends on the solution to the second—or ‘double-spending’—problem. Considered the principal obstacle to the creation of digital money, the problem of double-spending arises automatically in a medium which effects transfers by copying. Unless money is deducted from the payer as it is credited to the payee, value-conserving expenditures are impossible, yet this simple operation—going against the grain of digital information exchange—seemed to require the introduction of a guarantor, or trusted external party, which the system itself was unable to integrally provide.

Private mining rig. Source: bitcoinexaminer.org. All rights reserved.

This is Bitcoin’s most unmistakable breakthrough. Every transaction taking place within the system is entered into a sequential public ledger, or blockchain, which has to be updated as a whole for any exchange to be registered. The cryptographic work of the system’s mining activity now acquires a secondary, automatic function, validating each blockchain iteration, and defending the ledger from usurpation by fraudulent agents. The guarantor of each value-preserving ‘cash’ transfer is thus the entire blockchain itself, operating as a spontaneous or agent-independent trust mechanism. Through this continuously updated, integrated record of all commercial events, the blockchain supports a consistent account of Internet-communicable synthetic scarcity, or self-regulated digital rationing—in other words, the world’s first fully-decentralized electronic money system.Bitcoin scarcity is decentralized due to its independence from the promises of an issuing authority.

In describing this system, one passes very rapidly from the singular to the generic, in a way that is easily understood by analogy, and worth dwelling upon momentarily. Had Netscape been adopted as the name for web browsers in general, certain confusions would almost certainly have arisen. Most significantly, the question “will Netscape survive?” would have been fatally ambiguous. As actual history has demonstrated, Netscape in this counter-factual sense was able both to die, and to thrive beyond all prior expectation. Many hundreds of millions of people use a ‘Netscape’ every day, although under other (specific and general) names, while only a vanishingly small fraction are aware that Netscape ever existed. It is not clear whether Bitcoin, in its specific sense, could ever be entirely extinguished, but it could certainly be marginalized to the edge of irrelevance: driven from the market by competitive cryptocurrencies through which Bitcoin, in the general sense, advances towards ubiquity.

In its broadest evocation, Bitcoin symbolizes a gathering Internet revolution, of a scale and profundity that is difficult to exaggerate. The technical capability required to run BTC—installed blockchain-supporting software—has a potential extending far beyond the currency itself, and only a very small fraction of this has been explored thus far. This is most dramatically evidenced in the growth of a sprawling spin-off bitcoin ecology of altcoins, or Bitcoin-like P2P contract systems, tagged by the -coin suffix. Prominent altcoins include Darkcoin, Dogecoin, Litecoin, Namecoin, and Truthcoin, with many others on the way. At the outer edge of blockchain abstraction lie applications such as Ethereum, whose Turing-complete scripting language can support smart contracts, and even autonomous intelligent agents. At this point of sophistication, the ultimate potentialities of the system are not merely undetermined, but undeterminable in principle, and the gateway to a previously unvisited techno-commercial cosmos is opened.

It is this extreme generality that Eli Dourado celebrates in his article “Bitcoin isn’t Money—It’s the Internet of Money,” arguing:
Bitcoin is not just a substitute for money; it can be a form of generalized, programmable, decentralized contracting. […] Most of Bitcoin’s critics are making a category error. They are taking aim at Bitcoin the currency, when in fact Bitcoin is much more than a currency, in the same way that the Internet is much more than the telecommunication services that preceded it. […] Bitcoin is a new transport layer for finance that allows decentralized, disruptive, permissionless ^[4] development of applications on a separate layer. It has the capability to do for finance what the Internet did for communication.

Among the blockchain-based facilities Dourado envisages are assurance contracts, prediction markets, and continuous micropayments, as well as notary, bonded identity, and reputation rating services. It is easy to see why ‘getting’ Bitcoin triggers something akin to metaphysical shock. As a self-sufficient digital depository for legal identity, it exhibits—virtually—a potential to absorb the cultural infrastructure of formal transactions without obvious limit. There is perhaps no conceivable ‘deal’ without blockchain compatibility, and therefore no definite horizon to its commercial, legal, or even political utility.

Of particular relevance here is the blockchain innovation of artificial trust often referred to as trustlessness since it substitutes for trust, and is thus pre-adapted to a world in which trust is unavailable.[ref]Google the combination “trustless + bitcoin” for abundant confirmation.[/ref] Under the conditions currently impending, a global hegemonic transition occurring beyond international consensus or civilizational continuity, this deep feature of Bitcoin seems certain to be foregrounded. By apparent remarkable coincidence, a collapsing order of promises, or credible global authorities, is accompanied by the emergence of an alternative system of credibility. As the traditional supports of the world’s institutional architecture are subjected to accelerating erosion,^[5] the premium upon trustless functionality can only increase. Bitcoin suggests itself as a replacement for authoritative guarantors, while opening entirely novel vistas of decentralized institutional creation. The contextual friction, dysfunction, and disagreement of a world in hegemonic disarray only reinforce its attraction.

In comparison to the smooth transitions in economic supremacy, from the United Provinces, to the United Kingdom, to the United States, the passage beyond the American world order can only be considered rough. It is this roughness that shapes the socket, for which Bitcoin—in its most expansive sense—is the plug. The installation of trustless systems fits into a hole in the world.

How does the rise of trustless Internet technology modify the strategic landscape of the great powers, and the world’s other principal actors? To what extent can their responses be anticipated? Only by addressing these questions can some concreteness be introduced to our understanding of the path ahead. They therefore provide the topic for the third (and final) part of this series.

^[1] The mechanism, roughly described, is that the chronic trade deficits required for the international distribution of a reserve currency undermine the domestic economic fundamentals upon which that same currency’s credibility initially, and ultimately, depends. This endogenous mechanism is sharpened by geostrategic rivalry, and further destabilized by complicating, partially independent factors such as the vicissitudes of the petrodollar convention. In combination, their effect has exhibited a clear directionality in recent times, with the proportion of international foreign reserves held in US dollars declining from 55 percent to 33 percent since 2000.

^[2] Transition of world economic leadership from the United Provinces to the United Kingdom was institutionally facilitated by transnational elite integration, crowned by the Glorious Revolution of 1688. The later succession of the United States to global economic preeminence involved a less clearly formalized, but nevertheless unmistakable degree of regime coordination, built in large part upon the military, administrative, and intelligence cooperation forged in the crucible of World War II. Innumerable indicators might be mentioned, including even the dynastic factor of Winston Churchill’s hybrid Anglo-American ancestry.

^[3] The identity of Satoshi Nakamoto remains a topic of intense speculation, exceeding the bounds of the present discussion.

^[4] Dourado cites Vinton Cerf’s 2012 article “Keep the Internet Open,” where the notion of “permissionless innovation” plays a crucial conceptual role.

^[5] Monetary authorities are the most relevant example here, but every institution dependent upon some measure of public trust is, in principle, susceptible to implicit competition from blockchain-based (trustless) alternatives.

The German school argued that emphasizing consumption would eventually be self-defeating. It would bias the system away from wealth creation—and ultimately make it impossible to consume as much. To use a homely analogy: One effect of getting regular exercise is being able to eat more food, just as an effect of steadily rising production is being able to consume more. But if people believe that the reason to get exercise is to permit themselves to eat more, rather than for longer term benefits they will behave in a different way. List’s argument was that developing productive power was in itself a reward.

[…] The German view is more paternalistic [than that of the Anglo-Americans]. People might not automatically choose the best society or the best use of their money. The state, therefore, must be concerned with both the process and the result. Expressing an Asian variant of the German view, the sociologist Ronald Dore has written that the Japanese—“like all good Confucianists”—believe that “you cannot get a decent, moral society, not even an efficient society, simply out of the mechanisms of the market powered by the motivational fuel of self-interest.” So, in different words, said Friedrich List.

—James Fallows, “How the World Works,” The Atlantic (December 1993).

The perception of the Chinese Internet among international observers and commentators is dominated by an impression of control.^[1] At the center of China’s—deliberately conspicuous—system of digital communications oversight stands the Golden Shield project, far more popularly known as “the Great Firewall of China.”

No less than the original Great Wall, or even the Imperial Palace, the Great Firewall is a monument. It is first of all a statement, and only secondarily a functional apparatus, with capabilities sufficient to give said statement public credibility. What it overtly means is more important than what it covertly does. The message is long familiar, and recognizably Confucian rather than distinctly communist: signaling social defiance is not a tolerable cultural decision.

This seems to be an improbable environment in which to insert blockchain cryptosystems. Bitcoin unmistakably retains an aura of extreme social defiance.^[2] The legacy of the libertarian-oriented hacker counterculture remains clearly legible in its founding documentation and among its first-wave supporters. Among its most ardent proponents, the vitriolic presupposition of government illegitimacy is combined with an approximately unconditional endorsement of anarchistic—or at least agoristic—practices.^[3] In this sense, Bitcoin appears as the impending fulfillment of the “Californian Ideology”—a hyper-capitalist assertion of spontaneous order, or radical decentralization, essentially antagonistic to all concentrated authority.

Any balanced estimation of Bitcoin’s prospects in China has to begin with a realistic correction of this impression. While insight into Chinese security analysis is never easily attained, it can be confidently assumed that revolutionary agorism does not figure prominently on any official list of Internet threats. Even in America, in comparatively close cultural proximity to the ‘cipherpunks’ of the West Coast, Bitcoin is undergoing rapid, and far-reaching domestication.^[4] In China, where ideological libertarianism is effectively nonexistent, the possibility of technologically catalyzed anarchist politics has to seem vanishingly remote.

The concerns of Chinese officials with regards to the Internet are quite different. They are overwhelmingly oriented to the perceived threat of mass activism, triggered by social media networks, and exemplified by the dynamics of the so-called Color Revolutions in the ex-Soviet republics and subsequently by the Arab Spring.^[5] It is the capacity of the Internet to amplify a dissident public ‘voice’, rather than to facilitate a private ‘exit’, that determines the security priorities of the Great Firewall. From this perspective, the Bitcoin menace is relatively minor, even trivial, in comparison to Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, and similar channels of vocal dissent.

The administrative challenges Bitcoin does pose to the Chinese authorities are of a technical, rather than existential-ideological, nature, and only tangentially related to the country’s monumental apparatus of Internet control. The most politically-charged concern is capital flight or money laundering, but this is a topic of mind-boggling complexity, involving everything from high-level corruption on a titanic scale, through organized crime, to informally tolerated business activities and the attempts of small private actors to secure savings or diversify regime risk. Corruption is clearly perceived by the Chinese Communist Party as an indirect source of political insecurity, and few doubt that the potential of Bitcoin to facilitate the concealment and expatriation of illicit funds was a leading motive for the restrictions imposed so far.^[6]

In “How the World Works,” James Fallows excavates the neo-mercantilist political-economic theory of Friedrich List from its oblivion within the Anglophone world. He argues that the laissez-faire commercial ideal, considered by English-speaking nations as an undisputed norm of rational economic order, has a remarkably limited application beyond these nations. Elsewhere it is treated as a set of impractical, culturally and situationally specific principles, to which only the most nominal deference can safely be paid. The passage of two decades has done nothing to erode the pertinence of this observation.

List’s “German System,” which was also Alexander Hamilton’s “American System”—and indeed the ‘system’ of every challenger power seeking accelerated industrialization under conditions of strategic disadvantage—was characterized by a series of anomalous features relative to the free-market hegemonic norm that has been identified with Anglophone cultures for over two centuries, and maritime Protestant Atlantic powers for longer still.^[7] Yet even these core economic powers, prior to their ascent to industrial dominion, subordinated commercial liberties to nationalistic development imperatives. Both geographically and historically, the ‘normality’ of the open market is exposed as rare and precarious. As Fallows remarks in “How the World Works”:

Every country that has caught up with others has had to do so by rigging its rules: extracting extra money from its people and steering the money into industrialists’ hands. […] Today’s Americans and Britons may not like this new system, which makes their economic life more challenging and confusing than it would otherwise be. They are not obliged to try to imitate its structure, which in many ways fits the social circumstances of East Asia better than those of the modern United States or Britain. But the English-speaking world should stop ignoring the existence of this system—and stop pretending that it doesn’t work.

Where Chinese Internet policy is concerned, “ignoring the existence of this system” amounts to an interpretative orientation fixated upon domestic security politics and human rights issues, while overlooking its neo-mercantilist features. When this bias is corrected, the “Chinese System” of digital mercantilism can be seen as a classic example of strategically accelerated industrialization, based upon selective protections directed at those business sectors perceived as most essential to the nation’s economic future. Quite evidently, the Internet occupies center stage in this strategy, which identifies it as the basic techno-economic platform of the twenty-first-century world. Arguably, the peculiarities of the Chinese Internet make far more sense in the context of geo-strategic industrial competition, than in that of domestic regime insecurity.

The most pronounced features of the “Chinese System” are not restrictions on free political expression—although these can of course be found—but rather the emergence of domestic Chinese business analogs for the major players of the international (i.e., American) Internet economy. The most obvious digital Sino-clones include Baidu (Google), Taobao (eBay, Amazon), Youku (YouTube), Weibo (Twitter), WeChat (Facebook), and Alipay (Paypal). From this perspective, it begins to seem that much less is being prevented than replicated.

As previously noted in this series, Bitcoin designates both a specific digital cryptocurrency (BTC), and a technical innovation in electronic communications of extreme generality (the blockchain), potentially enveloping all Internet-based activity. Besides its intrinsic significance, the currency can be understood as a test implementation of the blockchain system. Increasingly, as the anticipated techno-economic consequences of the blockchain breakthrough have loomed ever larger, it is the second, expansive sense of Bitcoin that has begun to prevail—even as the currency has entrenched itself among the world’s resilient monetary realities.

As the extraordinary implications of blockchain technology have come into focus,^[8] historical analogies have escalated. While it may once have made sense to compare Bitcoin to a particular Internet application of great generality, such as the web browser, or perhaps to the World Wide Web, a general-purpose platform built upon the Internet, it is increasingly common to find blockchain technology compared to the Internet as such. On this ever more plausible account the blockchain is of equivalent socioeconomic import to the basic Internet-enabling innovation of packet switching communications—a once-in-a-Kondratieff-wave-level infrastructural revolution. If this is the case, it is a candidate to be the commanding technology of the first half of the twenty-first century.

How might the “Chinese System” be expected to respond to this emerging reality? Everything we have seen so far points in one direction: Clone war. For China to reject the blockchain revolution would be an abdication from all industrial leadership ambitions in the coming digital economy. The only Chinese strategic option compatible with the digital industrialization path so far taken is a Sinification of the technology—a blockchain with Chinese characteristics, in which distributed ledger systems are accommodated to the country’s social and cultural realities. There is no reason to think this will be an easy thing to achieve, but nothing else could possibly work.

^[1] The theatrical tradition of Chinese power is an indispensable reference here. China has been exceptional among the great civilizations for the emphasis it has placed upon public perception as the key to administrative authority, with an understanding of rule as essentially dramatic. In the narrow context that concerns us here, it is important to note that in the eyes of the Chinese authorities being seen to control Internet communications takes precedence over the subordinate and instrumental social and technical capabilities involved. This can be contrasted with Internet security politics in the United States, where invisible data-traffic monitoring receives clear priority.

^[2] In order to arrive at a remotely concrete sense of “defiance” it is no doubt important to distinguish between those actors (associated more with the Left) seeking to break into the public sphere in the name of protest, and those (associated more with the Right) seeking to break out of the public sphere, to protect private interests from social or government accountancy. It can scarcely be controversial to propose that, while concern for the latter is by no means negligible in today’s China, it is the former that elicits genuine alarm.

^[3] This aspect of Bitcoin has been dramatized by the online black-market Silk Road run by Dread Pirate Roberts (Ross Ulbricht), recently described by Daniel Krawisz as “the greatest agorist of our times.”

^[4] This trend is personified by Marc Andreessen, whose promotion of Bitcoin “mainstreaming” includes an explicit attempt to reframe the blockchain (distributed public ledger) as a defense against excessive anonymity, fully compatible with government regulatory interests. Insofar as arguments of this kind are found persuasive in Washington DC and New York, they are likely to find an appreciative reception in Beijing.

^[5] Irrespective of the actual contribution of social media to these events, the seriousness with which it was taken by the Chinese authorities is beyond serious question. During the spring of 2011, the word “Jasmine” was targeted for suppression by the Chinese Great Firewall filter, despite its rich cultural resonances in the country.

^[6] BTC China was founded in June 2011 with Bobby Lee as CEO. It had risen to become the world’s largest bitcoin exchange (by volume) by 18 December 2013, when it temporarily suspended acceptance of RMB deposits, following a People’s Bank of China statement on the crypto-currency, released on the 5th of that month. Chinese Internet giant Baidu, which had been accepting BTC payments since October 2013, ceased accepting the currency following the PBOC statement. Although RMB depository services were partially resumed at BTC China in January 2014, Baidu has not returned to the currency, stalling the development of bitcoin within China as a means of payment. Price movements of bitcoin on international exchanges have reflected the enormous significance of Chinese events to its perceived value.

^[7] Fallows usefully lists the distinctive emphases of the “German System”: planning over spontaneity; producers over consumers; outcome over process; national over individual interest; zero-sum over positive-sum economic relations; and Realpolitik over moralism.

^[8] Although the ultimate scope of Bitcoin escapes ready apprehension, it is already clear that it is roughly coextensive with the form of the contract in general, within which monetary systems are comprehended. Any actually or potentially formal human agreement is blockchain compatible, and it is through the blockchain that many previously tacit social arrangements can be expected to attain formalization. The horizon of the blockchain, therefore, is that of deal-making in general. Once this is understood, the predictions of those such as Marc Andreessen—who sees the potential blockchain economy scaling into the multi-trillion-dollar range within a matter of decades—seem entirely reasonable. Global commerce, as a whole, is in principle a subset of blockchain-supported relationships. As this becomes ever more obvious, the prospect of an economically ambitious society attempting to opt out of this future will become increasingly implausible. It is already unimaginable that China could want to do so.

East-plus-West at the frontier of freedom

In accordance with the widely-held belief that digital communication technologies ‘destroy distance’, James C. Bennett coined the term ‘Anglosphere’ to describe the arena of comparatively frictionless cultural proximity binding spatially-dispersed Anglophone populations. His contention was that the gathering trends exemplified by the development of the Internet would continue to promote cultural ties, whilst eroding the importance of spatial neighborhoods. In the age of the World Wide Web, cultural solidarity trumps geographical solidarity.

Whilst alternative culture-spheres – expressly including the Sinosphere – were mentioned in passing, they were not the focus of Bennett’s account. His attention was directed to English-speaking peoples, scattered geographically, yet bound together by threads of common understanding that derived from a shared language, English common law and limited-government traditions, highly-developed civil societies, individualism, and an unusual tolerance for disruptive social change. He predicted both that these commonalities would become increasingly consequential in the years to come, and that their general tenor would prove highly adaptive as the rate of social change accelerated worldwide.

Bennett’s concern with large-scale cultural systems can be seen as part of an intellectual trend, comparable in significant respects to Samuel Huntington’s influential ‘Clash of Civilizations’ thesis. In a world that is undergoing tectonic shifts in the distribution of wealth, power, and hegemony, such preoccupations are understandable. In these circumstances, it would be surprising if the partisans of Anglospheric and Sinospheric cultural traditions were not aroused to ardent advocacy of their relative merits and demerits, and — if Bennett is taken seriously — such discussions will take place in zones of cultural communion that are, at least relatively, increasingly introverted. The rapid emergence of a highly-autonomous ‘Chinese Internet’ in recent years adds weight to such expectations.

In March, the Z/Yen Group released the ninth in its series of Global Financial Centres Index rankings, in which Shanghai leapt to shared fifth place with Tokyo (on GFCI ratings of 694). London (775), New York (769), Hong Kong (759), and Singapore (722) led the pack. (The top 75 can be seen here).

Both Anglosphereans and Sinosphereans can find ready satisfaction in these ratings. The persistent supremacy of London and New York attests to a 250-year history of world economic dominance, whilst the ascent of Chinese-ethnicity commercial cities to the remaining top-slots clearly indicates the shift of economic gravity to the western Pacific region. Yet the most interesting pattern lies in-between. Neither Hong Kong nor Singapore belong unambiguously to a Sinosphere (still less to a broad Anglosphere). Instead, they are characterized by distinctive forms of Chinese-Anglophone hybridity – an immensely successful cultural synthesis. It would be difficult to maintain that Shanghai was entirely untouched by a comparable phenomenon, inherited in that case from the synthetic mentality of its concession-era International Settlement, and reflected in its singular Haipai or ‘ocean culture’.

The existence of an identifiable Sino-Anglosphere – or Singlosphere – is further suggested by the Heritage Foundation’s 2011 Index of Economic Freedom (rated on a scale of 0-100). On that list, the top two places are taken by Hong Kong (89.7) and Singapore (87.2), followed by Australia (82.5) and New Zealand (82.3). The Anglospherean and Sinospherean territorial cores fare less impressively, with none meeting the Heritage criteria for free economies — the United States comes ninth (77.8), the United Kingdom 16th (74.5), and mainland China 135th (52.0). It seems that the Singlosphere has learnt something about economic freedom that exceeds the presently-manifested wisdom of both cultural root-stocks – setting a model for the Sinosphere, and leaving the Anglosphere trailing in its wake.

As the deep secular trend of Chinese ascent and (relative if not absolute) American decline leads to ever more ominous rumblings and threats of geostrategic tension, it is especially important to note a quite different, non-confrontational pattern – based upon cultural merging and reciprocal liberation. Within the Singlosphere, an emergent, synthetic ethnicity exhibits a dynamically adaptive, cosmopolitan competence without peer, as distinct traditions of spontaneous order fuse and reinforce each other. Adam Smith meets Laozi, and the profound amalgamation of the two results in an unfolding innovated culture that increasingly dominates world rankings of economic capability.

A remarkable study by Christian Gerlach excavates the Daoist roots of European laissez-faire (or wu wei) ideas, and anarcho-capitalist maverick Murray Rothbard was attracted to the same ‘Ancient Chinese Libertarian Tradition’. Ken McCormick calls it The Tao of Laissez-Faire. (Those disturbed by this identification might be more comfortable with Silja Graupe’s leftist critique of ‘Market Daoism’.)

McCormick concludes his essay:

The recent ascendance of free-market ideas around the world probably owes more to the practical historical success of those ideas than to the persuasiveness of any theory or philosophy. Yet one might speculate that the startling success of economic liberalization in the People’s Republic of China might in part be explained by the fact that the idea of free markets is embedded in the culture. In fact, the Confucianism that long dominated China was actually a synthesis of competing schools of thought, including Taoism … Hence, while laissez-faire has frequently been absent from Chinese practice, it is not at all alien to Chinese culture. The recent free-market reforms in China might therefore be interpreted not so much as an importation of a foreign ideology but as a reawakening of a home-grown concept.

The Singlosphere sets both East and West on the right track. The more that Shanghai recalls and learns from it — and the deeper its participation — the faster its ascent will be.

Well-engineered, formidable, yet also lumbering constructions are directed into battle against horrific monsters, with the fate of the world at stake. Guillermo del Toro’s movie Pacific Rim is one of these entities, and the ethno-political review by ‘white advocacy’ writer Gregory Hood is another.

Within this cascade of monstrous signs, a convulsive re-ordering of the world from out of the Pacific is a constant reference. With the shocking scale of a tsunami, and the insidiousness of an obscure intelligence, it inundates the Old Order, starting from the ocean’s coastal ramparts. “When alien life entered the earth it was from deep within the Pacific Ocean. … the Breach.” City after city falls prey to the Kaiju. “This was not going to stop.”

The response is formulaic, and statically defensive. Perhaps some kind of massive sea-wall will work? Hood is at his best in laying out the weary Cathedralist pieties of the Hollywood plot line:

If poets are the unacknowledged legislators of mankind, filmmakers are the educators, grooming the mass public to accept certain ideas in preparation for them to be implemented as policy. The acceptance of global security forces instead of national armies, the worship of blacks as natural leaders, and the promotion of an international political creed of egalitarianism, secular humanism, and intrusive (but benevolent) government …

Yet the plot-line of his review is no less predictable than that of the movie, appealing to a irrecoverable (and already mythical) confidence in a white lineage of ethno-nationalist self-government, functionally-adequate native traditions, and tested bonds of kin, as if all of these things remained untried resources to fall back upon, rather than efficient historical antecedents to the developments now being deplored. It was under the conditions of white global dominion that socialism was entrenched, and evangelical moral universalism elevated to its climactic pitch of ethno-masochistic implosion. Defenselessness before the Kaiju was not something the Kaiju brought about.

The most telling blindness of Hood’s review lies close to its heart, in the denunciation of multiculturalism. Rather than striking at Del Toro’s movie at its point of maximum Cathedralist vulneraility — which is to say, in its entirely generic, universalist presentation of the multicultural ideal — Hood repeats this same indiscriminate category without significant modification, seeking only to criticize what Del Toro promotes. This would be seriously unserious anywhere. On the Pacific Rim, it is a truly disastrous disqualification of perception.

The only reality-sensitive response to the problem of multiculturalism is to ask: Which cultures? Neither Del Toro (the Cathedral), nor Hood (ethno-traditionalism), seem to have the slightest interest in this question. Indiscriminate demographic entropy is either to be promoted, or lamented, but in both cases accepted as the only relevant alternative to a fantastically-imagined, dying world of distinct peoples. If the paint is let out of the tubes, it has to be stirred together with maximum conceptual rapidity into homogeneous brown.

Discussing the film’s central micro-alliance, between its occidental hero and oriental heroine, Hood writes:

None of this makes any sense of course. The “drift compatible” connection seems to require a kind of deep bond that almost always requires family ties. However, in this film, the conflict is driven by the struggle of the rebellious hero and the non-white female to prove that two people who have no shared history or kinship can work together, and in fact be better than everyone else. Where traditional national and family bonds have failed us, multiculturalism will save the day.

As an ethno-racial descriptor, ‘non-white’ is simply sad. It isn’t even trying. Concretely, in this case, it ensures that the true nonsense of the movie eludes attention, which is the displacement of  real Pacific Rim ethno-synthesis by a merely cosmetic substitute.

As Hood emphatically notes, the relationship between (white American) Raleigh and (Japanese) Mako is not explicitly romantic, but it occupies the formula-position of a film romance, even when — admirably — it restricts itself to an intense practical partnership. I just love Japanese-American ethno-synthesis to bits, but it has almost no relevance to the real cultural process on the Pacific Rim, which is overwhelmingly dominated by Anglo-Chinese hybridism.

Japan is one of the world’s few modern ethno-nationalist states, with a strongly-preserved native culture, tightly-restricted immigration and citizenship criteria, and low English-language competence. In other words, it makes a far more tempting target for ‘multiculturalist’ (or demographic entropy) criticism than America does. But it’s ‘non-white’ so Hood doesn’t notice.

Even more peculiarly — and despite its Hong Kong setting  — Pacific Rim represents China’s contribution to the multicultural alliance through three weirdo brothers who get rubbed out at the first plausible opportunity. Without wanting to be unnecessarily crude, I have to repeat — Hong fricking Kong. This is the post-1949 capital of the Singlosphere, and therefore the natural location for a centrally accentuated US-Japanese working relationship? If this isn’t quite “who cares? They’re all wogs anyway” it’s something remarkably close.

The Pacific Rim, insofar as it matters, is the a Singlosphere cultural catastrophe, a distinctively non-generic ethno-synthesis that has created the most advanced and competitive societies on the planet — Hong Kong, Singapore, and Old Shanghai among them. Del Toro and Hood conspire to efface this fact, even as both, indirectly, address it.

Insofar as we are told anything, it is that in our most desperate moments, we have to jettison Tradition. Instead, we must rely on feelings, on multicultural partnership, on wishes and fantasies and hopes about what the world might be, rather than what it is.

–– that’s Hood, not remotely understanding what he’s saying.

This seems right:

Razeen Sally, a visiting associate professor at the Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy, wrote this year in Singapore’s Straits Times that: “A global city is where truly global services cluster. Business — in finance, the professions, transport and communications — is done in several languages and currencies, and across several time zones and jurisdictions. Such creations face a unique set of challenges in the early 21st century. Today, there appear to be only five global cities. London and New York are at the top, followed by Hong Kong and Singapore, Asia’s two service hubs. Dubai, the Middle East hub, is the newest and smallest kid on the block. Shanghai has global-city aspirations, but it is held back by China’s economic restrictions — the vestiges of an ex-command economy — and its Leninist political system. Tokyo remains too Japan-centric, a far cry from a global city.”

It’s a striking indication of the extent to which the world order remains structured by the Anglo-Colonial legacy. However one would like to see the world run, this hub-net is an essential clue to the way it is run now.

A long, but insightful look at the planetary strategic environment puts recent developments in theoretical context:

After decades of quiet preparation, Beijing has recently begun revealing its grand strategy for global power, move by careful move. Its two-step plan is designed to build a transcontinental infrastructure for the economic integration of the world island from within, while mobilizing military forces to surgically slice through Washington’s encircling containment.

The initial step has involved a breathtaking project to put in place an infrastructure for the continent’s economic integration. By laying down an elaborate and enormously expensive network of high-speed, high-volume railroads as well as oil and natural gas pipelines across the vast breadth of Eurasia, China may realize Mackinder’s vision in a new way. For the first time in history, the rapid transcontinental movement of critical cargo — oil, minerals, and manufactured goods — will be possible on a massive scale, thereby potentially unifying that vast landmass into a single economic zone stretching 6,500 miles from Shanghai to Madrid. In this way, the leadership in Beijing hopes to shift the locus of geopolitical power away from the maritime periphery and deep into the continent’s heartland.

As a trivial point of perspective, it might be worth noting that this blog’s ferocious Atlanteanism completely overwhelms its Sinophilia in regard to this question. If the emergence of a diasporic-maritime China, attuned to its Pacific Rim ethnic offshoots, is to be forestalled by a revival of dreams of dominion on the world island, the 21st century is about to take a peculiarly unfortunate turn.

China’s rise and the future of threedom

According to Arvind Subramanian, even conservative projections of comparative growth trends place China in a global position, by 2030, that is strikingly similar to that of Britain and of America at their respective moments of economic predominance, accounting for a share of the world economy roughly 150% the size of its closest rival. If this were to come to pass, such leadership would invoke ‘hegemony’ as a matter of sheer quantitative fact – quite irrespective of explicit intentions. The ‘Chinese model’ would promote itself, even in the complete absence of political and diplomatic reinforcement, and the magnetic power of Chinese culture would continue to strengthen in approximate proportion to its commercial influence. China would become the object of irresistible attraction – counterbalanced, no doubt, by resentments – and its example would burn incandescent, even in the offended eyes of its detractors. So what is this ‘example’?

In exploring this question, one place to begin is the history of economic hegemony, and in particular that instantiated by the Anglo-American powers over their two ‘long centuries’ of global supremacy. This is a topic pursued with exceptional insight by Walter Russell Mead, most remarkably in his work God and Gold: Britain, America, and the Making of the Modern World.

Mead locates the key to ‘Anglosphere’ hegemony in the ‘Golden Meme’ of the invisible hand, originating in the religious idea of providence, and modernized in Newtonian celestial mechanics, Smithian political economy, and Darwinian evolutionary biology. At its most abstract, this idea is both an affirmation and a renunciation, with its potency and suppleness stemming from both. To acknowledge the invisible hand is to foster a special kind of positive fatalism, trusting in the spontaneous trend of history, which is embraced as a covenant, and an overt or implicit election (in the theological sense). Such themes are undisguisedly religious, and Mead does nothing to obscure their roots in the Abrahamic tradition, or meta-tradition, which lays out a providential vision of history as finite, progressive, and inevitable, tending inexorably to eschatological completion, structured by superhuman law, and (through its divine predestination) facilitating the function of prophecy.

The deep culture of the Anglosphere is not only generically Abrahamic, however, it is also specifically pluralistic. The invisible hand takes center stage because the center is otherwise vacated, or distributed. Esoteric providence supplants exoteric sovereignty because an inability to reach agreement is eventually institutionalized – or at least informally stabilized — in a triangular balance of power.

What the British ultimately did was to rely on what Burke called “convention.” Scripture, tradition, and reason – each had its place and each had its devotees. But all of them went wrong if you pressed them too far. You should respect the scriptures and defer to them but not interpret the scriptures in a way that led you into some weird millenarian sect or into absurd social behavior. You honored tradition but did not press it so far that it led you into the arms of royal absolutism or papal power. You can and should employ the critique of reason against the excesses of both scripture and tradition, but not press reason to the point where you ranted against all existing institutions., ate roots and bark for your health, or, worse, undermined the rights of property and the established church. One can picture John Bull scratching his head and slowly concluding that one must accept that in society there will be bible nuts, tradition nuts, and reason nuts – fundamentalists, papists, and radicals. This is not necessarily the end of the world. To some degree they cancel each other out – the fundamentalist zealots will keep the papists down and vice versa, and the religious will keep the radicals in their place – but the competition among sects will also prevent the established church from pressing its advantage too far and from forming too exalted an idea about the proper stature, prestige, and emoluments of the clergy. [p223]

Cultural hegemony follows from a semi-deliberate fatalization, as the sovereign center is displaced by a substantially automated social process, which no social agent is able to master or entirely impede. Each major faction steps back into its position in the triangle, from which it can strategically engage the others, but never fully dominate or eradicate them. The triangle as a whole constitutes a social and historical motor, without adequate representation at any identifiable point.

Pluralism, even at the cost of rational consistency, is necessary in a world of change. Countervailing forces and values must contend. Reason, scripture, tradition: they all have their uses, but any one of them, unchecked, will go too far. Moreover, without constant disputes, constant controversy, constant competition between rival ideas about how society should look and what is should do, the pace of innovation and change is likely to slow as forces of conservative inertia grow smug and unchallenged. [p231-2]

This blog has previously touched upon the Singlosphere, where aspects of Anglophone and Chinese culture converge in Manchester Liberal / Daoist acceptance of spontaneous order, or laissez-faire. Does this convergence extend to triadic pluralism, and apply to the Sinosphere core of the Chinese mainland? Mead’s analysis is highly suggestive in both respects.

In the first place, it encourages considerable equanimity in regards to the prospective global transition, even when attention is focused upon the political and ideological heartland of contemporary China. It might seem, superficially, that the passage from a leading world culture dominated by tacit Christian attitudes to one in which unfamiliar Sino-Marxist ideas rise to unprecedented international prominence must be characterized by an immense – even near-absolute – discontinuity. Can such a leap take place without succumbing to catastrophic culture-shock and unmanageable friction? When examined from a broader perspective, however, such alarmism is far less than fully warranted.

For better or for worse, the over-arching cultural continuity of the coming shift is ensured by the profound kinship tying Marxism into the broad family of Abrahamic belief systems. Theologically rooted in the dialectical engagement with Judeo-Christian spirituality, initiated by Hegel and Feuerbach, the basic framework of Marxist thinking only trivially perturbs the structure of prophetic, eschatological, redemptive, and providential history. Its millenarian expectations are no more terrifying than those of Jewish and Christian apocalypticism before it, its prophetic certainties no more irrational, its submission to the iron laws of history no more constraining, and its moral enthusiasm no more zealous or impractical.

The specter of a totalitarian Marxist resurgence in China is as realistic as the fear of a theocratic putsch in the United States of America, which is to say, it has no reality at all. In both cases, maturity, pluralism, and established traditions protect against the domination of society by any particular intolerant faction. It is unnecessary to be either Christian or Marxist to recognize the continuing world-historical momentum of a broad Abrahamic meta-narrative, or to accept the consistency of such large-scale social storytelling with the perpetual regeneration of practical impetus, or to see a settled, spontaneously improvised social solution – and incarnation of dynamic conservatism – in the enduring triangular stand-off between Marxist scriptures, Communist Party institutional traditions, and market radicalism in today’s China. As with Mead’s Anglospherean pluralism, the reciprocal limitations that each of these factions imposes on the others will inevitably disappoint many, but there is no reason for them to horrify anybody.

Insofar as Mead is correct in identifying Anglosphere hegemony with the reign of the tripod, or the socio-cultural realization of pluralism (as triangular dynamic stability), the disruptive potential of emerging Chinese leadership should be considered as massively discounted, because the tripod is a Chinese native. Every temple in the country is equipped with a three-footed incense burner, every museum bronze collection is dominated by three-legged cauldrons, and each of these tripods has definite, explicitly conceptual cultural meaning. This is not only based upon the obvious practical and intuitive truth that the simplest model of stability comes from the tripod, but also from a recognition that triangular stand-off exemplifies sustainable dynamism in its elementary form, disintegrating the universe into strategic possibility.

For literary elaboration of this theme, one need only turn to the Romance of the Three Kingdoms, perhaps the most widely read of China’s four great classical novels. Its most conspicuous instantiation as popular entertainment is seen in the game of paper, scissors, stone, which dates back (at least) to the Chinese Han Dynasty (206 BC – AD 220), when it was known as shoushiling.

The ultimate expression of triangular dynamic stability, not only in China, but worldwide, is undoubtedly presented by the Classic of Change, the Yi Jing, or Zhouyi. It is upon this work of singular, inhuman genius, in which sheer arithmetic speaks more purely than it has ever done before or since, that all of China’s ceremonial bronzes, literary flights, and childhood games converge.

In the numerical system of the Yi Jing, the tripod finds a source more basic than the Abrahamic meta-tradition can provide, regardless of how Trinitarian this latter has become. That is because, in this Chinese cultural ur-stratum, unity does not figure as an original unity, subsequently disintegrated into a theological, dialectical, or sociopolitical triangle but is, on the contrary, derived. As the Confucian commentary explains: “The number 3 was assigned to heaven, 2 to earth, and from these came the (other) numbers.” In the beginning were numbers – primordial dispersion.

The ‘language’ of the tripod finds its most convenient expression in the trigram, whose three lines constitute an elementary unit. To grasp the Yi Jing as a complete arithmetical model of the dynamic triad, however, it is necessary to proceed immediately to the structure of the hexagram.

Grasped in operation, the Yi Jing is not only a binary arithmetical system (as Leibniz interpreted it), but a bino-decimal conjunction. This is demonstrated by the fact that it systematically rewards the application of decimal digital reduction, and reveals its dynamic pattern only under these conditions. (This might, quite reasonably, be considered a highly surprising suggestion, since digital reduction – as it arose within the history of Western Qabbalism – seems to have been generated, automatically, from the interference of the decimal Hindu numerals with older alphabetical number systems, or ‘gematrias’, that attached cardinal values to specific letters, without use of place value. It is immediately obvious that this historical account cannot be translated into a Chinese context, where alphabets have no traditional root.)

Digital reduction is an extremely simple numerical technique, involving nothing besides single-digit additions and neglect of decimal magnitude. A multi-digit number is treated as a string of single digit additions, and the process is reiterated in the case of a multi-digit result.

Expressing the series of binary powers in decimal notation yields the familiar sequence 1, 2, 4, 8, 16, 32, 64, 128, 256, 512, 1024, 2048, 4096, 8192 … When this series is compressed to a string of single digits by reduction, it proceeds: 1, 2, 4, 8, (1 + 6 =) 7, (3 + 2 =) 5, (6 + 4 =) 1, (1 + 2 + 8 = 11 = 1 + 1 =) 2, (2 + 5 + 6 = 13 = 1 + 3 =) 4, (5 + 1 + 2 =) 8, (1 + 0 + 2 + 4 =) 7, (2 + 0 + 4 + 8 = 14 = 1 + 4 =) 5, and repeatedly, through the 6-step cycle 1, 2, 4, 8, 7, 5. This process exposes the arithmetical necessity of the Yi Jing hexagram, as an archetypal exhaustion of the phases of time.

To excavate the triadic or tripodic, it is helpful to turn to the classical (and now integral) Confucian commentary, the ‘Ten Wings’ (Shi Yi), which explore the structure of the trigrams and hexagrams in various ways. These include an explicit formula for folding the six lines of the hexagram back into a triad, by coupling the lines: first and fourth; second and fifth; third and sixth. These dyads have a consistent arithmetical order, when calculated in accordance with the reduced bino-decimal values generated above: 1 + 8 = 9; 2 + 7 = 9; 4 + 5 = 9. “What these six lines show is simply this, the way of the three Powers.”

Summation to nine regularly serves as a confirmation within the Shi Yi. For instance, in the section translated by Legge as ‘The Great Appendix’:

52. The numbers (required) for Khien (or the undivided line) amount to 216; those for Khwan (or the divided line), to 144. Together they are 360, corresponding to the days of the year.
53. The number produced by the lines in the two parts (of the Yî) amount to 11,520, corresponding to the number of all things.
54. Therefore by means of the four operations is the Yî completed. It takes 18 changes to form a hexagram.

144 = 1 + 4 + 4 = 9

216 = 2 + 1 + 6 = 9

360 = 3 + 6 + 0 = 9

11,520 = 1 + 1 + 5 + 2 + 0 = 9

18 = 1 + 8 = 9

There is much more to say on the importance of the number nine in traditional Chinese culture, and beyond, but this is not the time. For now, it suffices to note that nine, or ‘Old Yang’, represents the extreme point of maturity or positive accumulation in the Yi Jing, and thus incipient transition. It thus echoes the function of the same numeral within a zero-based decimal place-value system, strongly reinforcing the impression that the Yi Jing assumes cultural familiarity with such numeracy, and thus indicating its extreme antiquity within China.

The six-phase cycle collapses into a triadic dynamic, whose stages are the dyads 1&8, 2&7, 4&5. It is thus exactly isomorphic with the paper, scissors, stone circuit, or rather, this latter can be seen as a simplification of the Yi Jing dynamic tripod, treating each stage as simple, rather than twinned. Where the bagua, or set of trigrams, merely enumerates the set of 3-bit variants in static fashion, the system of hexagrams rigorously constructs a triangular dynamic, which is presented as a model of time.

If this is the ‘Chinese example’ at its most quintessential, then it is exactly the Anglosphere example, as determined by Mead, except carried to a far more exalted level of abstraction, or proto-conceptual purity. Dynamic pluralism is under no threat from a Chinese future, insofar as deep-cultural evidence counts for anything. The reign of the tripod has scarcely begun.

What’s the Chinese obsession with numbers all about?

The Mandate of Heaven (天命) belongs indisputably amongst the most ancient and conceptually richest political ideas. Dating back to the transition from the Shang to Zhou dynasties, over three millennia ago, it refounds the legitimacy of government in a conditional natural right (in contrast to the unconditional natural right asserted by the supplanted rulers of the Shang, and by divine right theorists in the occidental world). Tianming invests regimes whose performance expresses virtuous capability. Legitimacy is not, therefore, a formal endowment, but a substantial discovery, demonstrated through the art of government.

The claim that Tianming amounts to a realistic theory of political legitimacy requires far more support than this tentative short post will offer. In particular, it has to be defended against the objection that Tianming reverts to a tautology, either empirically or logically (or both). The Mandate of Heaven might be formulated: For so long as a regime succeeds it will endure.  Is this not, from the perspective of empirical history, an empty retrospective judgment, or sheer redundancy, and under logical consideration, a thinly disguised pleonasm?

Tianming could be dismissed on these grounds if its negation were inconceivable. Then, indeed, it would communicate no information. Yet this is not at all the case.

Perhaps the most relevant evidence for this is the provocative thesis found in Alexis de Tocqueville’s L’ancien régime et la Révolution that the successful promotion of social development is more threatening to regime stability than the complete absence of such achievement. This is an argument widely discussed in China today, for obvious reasons. If it holds true, the idea of Tianming — in anything other than its shallowest and most sophistical sense — is directly contradicted, in theory and fact. Reciprocally, it has to be acknowledged that the idea of Tianming poses an implicit challenge to the Tocqueville thesis, subject to confirmation or disconfirmation by historical events. The stakes of this (yet inarticulate?) controversy could scarcely be higher.

An intriguing reflexivity enters into the topic at this point, because the conditions for the confirmation of Tianming are related, through intricate nonlinearities, to the prospects of the PRC regime. Is development success rewarded or punished by ‘heaven’ (the nature of things)? If the latter, dialectical ruin ensues, as the high are brought low. If the former, economic ascent and political stability will have demonstrated their compatibility, revolutionary chaos will be precluded, and the rebalancing of the world order towards the western Pacific will continue. Under such conditions, there is every reason to expect that global trends will be incrementally ‘Confucianized’ with international political thinking increasingly inflected by Chinese characteristics. Simultaneously vindicated and promoted, the idea of Tianming will then find a wider receptive audience than it has ever known before.

Jeffrey Wasserstrom conducts a tour of Western dreams and nightmares of China. Whilst the span of the oscillation is remarkable, he finds the bipolar syndrome itself to be notably stable across time. The upswing — Wasserstrom suggests — is associated with hopes that ‘they’ are becoming more like ‘us’, but on the downswing:

… when the Western China Nightmare is dominant, the risk is that observers and the general public lose sight of how varied the Chinese populace is and instead grow accustomed to demonised images of China … filled not with flesh-and-blood Chinese individuals but a horde of soulless mannequins. […] Stories that dehumanise China’s population tout court are also periodically published, though only rarely do they do so as overtly as a 1999 Weekly Standard article which described the Chinese people as prone to ‘Borg-like’ group-think conformity.

When calmly dissected and investigated, durable stereotypes usually have something significant to say, about both their subjects and their objects. Western sinophobia is an especially rich hunting ground for cultural explorers, and the importance of understanding it is only going to grow. Urban Future will be bringing sustained attention to this same topic in the months ahead.

Somewhere deep in the task-queue here (at UF) is a post, or article, exploring the resonances between phobic Occidental responses to Orientals and robots (as promised, unreliably, in this post). Some grist for the mill:

Last week, the giant Chinese internet and gaming company Tencent published an article on its news portal about the rising price of consumer goods in China – not exactly earth-shattering news, except that the article was written by a robot called Dreamwriter. […] Dreamwriter wrote the 1000-word article, using algorithms that search online sources and data, in just 60 seconds. The article quoted economists and highlighted trends in a style indistinguishable from a human financial reporter. […] According to the South China Morning Post, Dreamwriter’s article was the first robot-written news article in the Chinese language.

The Morning Post quoted a Chinese journalist who said China’s state-run media doesn’t give reporters much creative license, which makes them easily replaceable by robot writers: “You know, many reporters working for government-run newspapers across the country usually copy and paste the statements and news press. They are not allowed to express doubt or really investigate reports against the authorities. So robot reporters could easily replace a lot of Chinese reporters like this nationwide.”

Zachary Keck is bemused by the findings of a recent Global Scan poll that finds broad Chinese satisfaction with the country’s media and surveillance environment. Among the findings, 76% of Chinese feel “free of surveillance” compared with only 54% of Americans. To the extent that oppression can be subjectively evaluated, Chinese ‘totalitarian communism’ isn’t doing it very well.

There might be some way to mine into this information rigorously, but that’s beyond the scope of the discussion so far. Keck muses about the possibility that the Edward Snowden leaks have soured Western opinion, while “it’s hard to know how much of the views can be attributed to different expectations Chinese have about freedom when compared to their counterparts in democratic countries, and how much of their answers are attributable to general ignorance about the Chinese government’s surveillance and censorship. I suspect both factors probably play a role but that the former is likely more important.”

An alternative explanation is that Western cultures have developed in a way that sanctifies dissent, and finds the exemplification of freedom in the act or expression of defiance. The alternative, Chinese assumption, that freedom is mostly about being left alone, is classically captured by the proverb “The mountains are high, and the Emperor is far away” (山高皇帝远). Unsurprisingly, this saying is thought to have originated in entrepreneurial Zhejiang Province (perhaps the most civilized place in the world).

Why would anybody but an idiot go looking for the emperor simply to poke a finger in his eye? Don’t do anything like that, and there’s not much chance of encountering oppression. Some flaky Internet connectivity doesn’t feel like a “a boot stamping on a human face — forever.” It feels like a minor inconvenience. At least, that’s what the poll evidence suggests.

Arthur Chu on an old saw:

There's a lot of news happening, never a good thing. It's not actually a Chinese curse but the sentiment is accurate #InterestingTimes

— Arthur Chu (@arthur_affect) August 12, 2014

(Wikipedia agrees with Chu.) Given the authenticity of the wisdom, the inauthenticity of the attribution is especially interesting. Is this a sign of Orientalism as a creative cultural influence?

This map has been doing the rounds:

(UF source here (via this))

Explanation at the original site:

Not religious, in this sense, is everyone who is left over when you have counted adherents. The World Christian Database, on which the data is based, use the term ‘nonreligionists’ and defines it as ‘ … encompassing the 2 varieties of unbeliever: (a) agnostics or secularists or materialists, who are nonreligious but not hostile to religion, and (b) atheists or anti-religious/anti-religionists opposed or hostile to religion.’

Territory size shows the proportion of people who are not religious living there. [Absolute numbers seem not to be a factor.]

Even after this gloss, ‘not religious’ is a dubious category, which tends to be defined in terms of Western (Abrahamic-Theistic) norms. (Is Chinese medicine, for example, in any serious way ‘non-religious’?) Nevertheless, the distribution is striking. Any conception of China’s rise (and it’s probable world cultural impact) is going to be missing something important if it neglects what is really jutting through here.

The American Interest discusses the Chinese crackdown on Church of the Almighty God (also known as Eastern Lightning) after a recruiting operation turned murderous. The general background is most probably familiar, but it’s important enough to run through again:

The strong Chinese reaction against splinter groups — in this case, five death sentences—sometimes surprises Western observers, but we only need to look to China’s history to see why such groups give Beijing officials the willies. In the 19th-century, the catastrophic Taiping Rebellion involved a group not wholly unlike the Church of the Almighty God. In that rebellion a millenarian sect lead by Hong Xiuquan claiming to be the younger brother of Jesus, rose up against the Qing dynasty. At least twenty million people died in the ensuing conflict.

There’s another reason that the rise of an apocalyptic cult would be of such concern. China’s long history of rising and falling dynasties has given rise to a school of historical analysis that looks for patterns in Chinese history. This approach, shared by many ordinary people and many distinguished Chinese intellectuals down through the ages, seeks to identify recurring features of the decline and fall phase of a dynasty’s cycle. The rise of apocalyptic religious cults is one of the classic signs of dynastic decadence, as is the rise of a pervasive culture of corruption among officials and the spread of local unrest.

Since the 18th century, the divorce of theological innovation from social revolution in Occidental public consciousness has pushed the religious question — originally identical with tolerance — into ever deeper eclipse. Until very recently, within the West, any attribution of genuine political consequence to such matters had seemed no more than eccentric anachronism, although this situation is quite rapidly changing. Elsewhere in the world, religious issues retained far greater socio-political pertinence, largely because the common millenarian root of enthusiasm and rebellion had not been effaced.

It is possible that the Chinese approach to dissident religion remains ‘strange’ to many in the West. There can surely be little doubt, however, that whatever convergence takes place will tend to a traditional Chinese understanding far more than a contemporary Western one. The gravity of the stakes ensures it.

It isn’t necessary to assume more than a sliver of positive feedback for confidence to make a significant difference. Once the future looks dim enough, it’s irresistibly rational to cannibalize what’s left of it, and then the term ‘death spiral’ begins to acquire real force. Of course, there are a great many other dynamic tangles at work, and popular sentiment is likely far more of an indicator than a driver. Still:

Ideas arising in a social environment quagmired in radical pessimism (or the opposite) probably require some careful discounting to correct for skew.

(Via Zero Hedge)

“Baizuo” — the greatest thing in 2017 so far.

Makes me think the world might pull through okay.

It’s all (amazingly) good, but this is probably the kernel:

The question has received more than 400 answers from Zhihu users, which include some of the most representative perceptions of the ‘white left’. Although the emphasis varies, baizuo is used generally to describe those who “only care about topics such as immigration, minorities, LGBT and the environment” and “have no sense of real problems in the real world”; they are hypocritical humanitarians who advocate for peace and equality only to “satisfy their own feeling of moral superiority”; they are “obsessed with political correctness” to the extent that they “tolerate backwards Islamic values for the sake of multiculturalism”; they believe in the welfare state that “benefits only the idle and the free riders”; they are the “ignorant and arrogant westerners” who “pity the rest of the world and think they are saviours”.

ADDED: Baizuo at Weimerica, and Spandrell’s place.

A new world order hits the buffers

“For nearly 30 years we have had two Global Strategies working in a symbiotic fashion that has created a virtuous economic growth spiral. Unfortunately, the economic underpinnings were flawed and as a consequence, the virtuous cycle has ended. It is now in the process of reversing and becoming a vicious downward economic spiral,” writes Gordon T. Long, in a guest post at Zero Hedge. “One of the strategies is the Asian Mercantile Strategy. The other is the US Dollar Reserve Currency Strategy.”

The system that Long sees unraveling has been dubbed ‘Chimerica’ by Niall Ferguson and Moritz Schularick, in reference to the mythical hybrid beast of antiquity. Chimerica emerged through the dynamic coupling of the US and Chinese economies, dominating the wave of globalization in the post-command economy world. It has served as a powerful engine of development, spreading prosperity beyond the narrow enclave of the (Euro-American) ‘First World’ and facilitating the global roll-out of digital network technologies, from personal computing and mobile telephony to the Internet. In recent years, however, its unsustainable features have become prominently visible.

Stripped to its fundamentals, Chimerica amounted to something akin to an informal geopolitical ‘deal’ that simultaneously promoted the international status of the US Dollar and domestic Chinese industrialization. The principal financial mechanism was the recycling of Chinese trade surpluses into US Treasury Bonds, in a process that accentuated Chinese competitiveness (by restraining the rise of the Yuan) and suppressed US inflation (preserving the credibility of the USD). This enabled Chinese industrial expansion to proceed at a far greater speed than its domestic market could have supported, whilst providing US governments with the latitude to run a chronically loose monetary policy immunized against the prospect of currency collapse. The Chinese manufacturing and US banking sectors were the most obvious beneficiaries. Both prospered conspicuously.

As Niall Ferguson wrote in November 2008, in the early days of the world financial crisis:

“At the heart of this crisis is the huge imbalance between the United States, with its current account deficit in excess of 1 percent of world gross domestic product, and the surplus countries that finance it: the oil exporters, Japan and emerging Asia. Of these, the relationship between China and America has become the crucial one. More than anything else, it has been China’s strategy of dollar reserve accumulation that has financed America’s debt habit. Chinese savings were a key reason U.S. long-term interest rates stayed low and the borrowing binge kept going. Now that the age of leverage is over, ‘Chimerica’ — the partnership between the big saver and the big spender — is key.”

Having reached a state of crisis, Chimerica seems certain to unwind. This might occur either through a measured rebalancing that increases Chinese domestic consumption whilst reducing US deficit spending, or as a messy disintegration — involving sudden demand contraction, currency wars, and escalating mutual recrimination. Whatever the eventual outcome, a refashioned world order is an inevitable – which is to say, definitional – result.

Whilst Ferguson hedges his bets, Gordon Long spells out a specific and ominous forecast, in which the virtuous cycle of Chimerican globalization reverses into a vicious ‘death spiral’. As ‘debt saturation’ closes down the option of policy continuity, the actions of the US Federal Reserve become manifestly ineffective, self-contradictory, and ultimately paralyzed. The long-postponed process of currency destruction then begins in earnest. Long offers a useful checklist of milestones on the road to ruin (proceeding from financial, through economic, to political calamity):

1. A deteriorating US dollar

2. Rising US interest rates

3. Sustained and chronic US unemployment

4. Asian inflation, especially in food where 60% of Asian disposable income is spent

5. Pressures on Asian currency pegs

6. Collapsing values of US Reserve holdings

By the end of this process, the world will have been violently catapulted out of a financial architecture dating back 70 years, and a dominant monetary philosophy that has prevailed over the course of centuries.

“The eventuality of a fiat currency crisis is ordained and has been since the early warnings in 2007 of the Financial Crisis,” Long insists. “The roadmap has been clear to all that actually wanted to look.”

Handle’s epic walk-through of Edward Luttwak on the rise of China is simply magnificent. If the Chinese foreign policy establishment doesn’t put it on a study list, the world is a more dangerous place than it needs to be. It says impressive things about Luttwak that his work is able to prompt commentary of such astounding quality. (Yes, it’s long, but you have to read it.)

As a Sinophile, and even (far more reservedly) a sympathizer with the post-Mao PRC regime, it’s disturbing to me how convincing I find this analysis. China really could blow itself up, along with a big chunk of the world’s sole truly dynamic region, by mis-playing its excellent foreign policy hand (in pretty much exactly the way Handle lays out). In particular, its ability to avoid the disastrous course of Germany’s rise is the most pressing question of the age, and the signs so far are not remotely encouraging. Having dug itself quite unnecessarily into a trap of increasingly embittered anti-China balancing, 2013 looks very clearly to have been the worst year since the beginning of Reform and Opening for Chinese geo-strategic decision making.

Reversing course is hard. The important thing for the Chinese leadership to understand is that challenges to global hegemony are almost inevitably catastrophic. There has not been a single case in modern history where such a transition has succeeded, except through close strategic alignment with the preceding hegemon. Holland passed the torch to the UK, which passed it on in turn to the USA. If China envisages an alternative path for itself — rooted in basic antagonism — it is shelving the lessons of modernity, and turning to something else, where ancient cycles lose themselves in the fog-banks of myth. Such deep historical precedent is far too poorly understood to offer anything like helpful advice. The atavistic popular feeling it rouses, however, is certainly strong enough to drive developments over a cliff.

US global hegemony has lost the Mandate of Heaven. The only way it could trawl it back is through the unforced errors of its enemies — which is to say, those who have blundered into being positioned as its enemies. On present trends, these foul-ups are all-too-likely to be made. That would mean world war, naturally tending to thermonuclear ruin, and the end of civilization. China would be finished as anything beyond a broken warning about what non-submission to the democratic zeitgeist leads to (having done to political sanity what Germany did to bio-realism). Through this climax of idiocy, the human species would have melodramatically disqualified itself from any significant historical agency going forward. Military robotics (aka ‘Skynet’, emerging from the war) would be the only intelligent prospect left.

Economics is complicated, but at least in certain respects it’s not that complicated. Chart almost any market-sensitive variable and what emerges is a wave pattern, varying in amplitude, frequency, and trend, but clearly conforming to a general pattern, mixing an irregular rhythm with a random walk.

The irregularity and randomness are predicated by elementary economic theory, since determinism and regularity are strictly equivalent to bank notes lying on the street, no sooner glimpsed than seized. Zero-risk speculative opportunities – of the kind any intelligible pattern presents – are quickly arbitraged back to noise, the equilibrium state, in which all significant information is absorbed into price.

The residual rhythm is more unexpected, and attests to an irrational factor, stimulating intellectual and practical controversy. Regardless of such disputes, it is possible to be confident about two indefinite points. Firstly, market rhythms are (almost) never easy to accurately predict, and thus exploit. Secondly, off-trend deviations will eventually be corrected, unless – very rarely – the trend itself changes shape. The qualification of the second point deserves special examination, because unrealistic expectations concerning trend-line transformations lie at the root of the most notorious error in practical economic reasoning – the belief (typically hardening in direct proportion to the inflation of a bubble) that “this time is different.” This slogan, which encapsulates the stubborn and disastrously expensive syndrome of downwards correction denial, should be written on the shirts of those who will soon be losing them.

Any market wave of sufficient amplitude crests in a bubble, which ‘pops’ in a crash. Unless this time is different – and it won’t be – China will inevitably experience such an event. Speculative commentary on the nature and timing of this event has increased markedly in volume as the global economic environment has deteriorated. Yet prediction is especially difficult in this case. China’s market economy is just a little over three decades old, with only occasional rough patches interrupting near-continuous, rapid growth. Disentangling the unsustainable component or rhythmic upswing from the underlying development path involves unusually hazy estimation, given the incompleteness of the pattern perceived.

In an article published in Caixin and Marketwatch (via), Andy Xie makes a substantial contribution to this discussion. He identifies China’s financial vulnerability with a massive asset bubble in the property market, but remains sanguine about its ultimate consequences. He argues persuasively that a very substantial write-down of real estate values, although inevitably disruptive, would have a tonic effect on the Chinese economy almost immediately, with fast recovery to follow.

Because China’s market economy does not yet have an identifiable long-term trend, Xie estimates the scale of the country’s property bubble by comparing the appreciation of real estate prices to wage growth:

China has experienced rapid increase in land prices in the past decade. Some of it can be justified by income and productivity growth due to the country joining the World Trade Organization. Most of the increase is a bubble phenomenon.

While household income may have tripled in a decade, the average land price has risen by over thirty times. Whatever income growth is to come cannot justify the current price of land. Nor can a supply shortage.

China has no shortage of land. High-rise urbanization makes demand for land quite low relative to the population. The sustainable land value is probably 70% to 80% below current levels.

The role of the property market in contemporary Chinese social life is a topic of widespread interest, both inside and outside the country. Because marriage prospects (for men) are tightly bound to their ability to provide a home, some very deeply-rooted Darwinian forces are harnessed to the appreciation of property values, making them an overwhelmingly dominant factor in economic life. For this reason, among others, a real estate crash that brought prices down to somewhere between a third and a fifth of their current level promises to be traumatizing and liberating in equal measure.

Xie recommends that China push through the pain, as quickly as realistically possible:

Some argue that the property bubble is essential to China’s economic prosperity. This is utter nonsense. While the property industry has become bigger relative to the economy over the past decade, it mostly consumes resources and doesn’t enhance overall productivity.

It is the main driver for China’s inflation. If it shrinks, the economy may suffer temporarily. However, overall productivity will rise. The resulting income growth will bring back more sustainable economic prosperity.

Also, a bubble bursts sooner or later. Government help merely prolongs it, as the Chinese government did in 2008. And the longer a bubble lasts, the more damage it inflicts upon bursting. The economy is suffering because of what happened in 2008.

The country has sufficient capacity to absorb whatever non-performing loans may come out of this bubble bursting. It could be 20 trillion to 30 trillion yuan ($3.26 trillion-$4.89 trillion). But the waste in the bubble economy could have been 5 trillion yuan.

China could overcome the legacy of the bubble in four to five years. Further, better productivity from post-bubble reforms could add another 2 trillion to 3 trillion yuan per annum. The post-bubble recovery could happen in three years.

Japan couldn’t get its economy growing after its property bubble burst. The main reason is that its per capita income was already among the highest in the world.

China is still a middle-income economy. Improving productivity is not that difficult. Reaching per capita income of $20,000 by 2030, excluding inflation, is quite possible, which would make China the largest economy in the world.

At Project Syndicate, Andrew Sheng and Xiao Geng provide a brief commentary on China’s economic policy outlook:

At the Third Plenum of the 18th Central Committee of the Chinese Communist Party, currently under way in Beijing, President Xi Jinping is unveiling China’s reform blueprint for the next decade. In advance of its release, the Development Research Center of the State Council, China’s official think tank, presented its own reform proposal – the so-called “383 plan” – which offers a glimpse of the direction that the reforms will take.

Despite a keen sense of the obstacles ahead, the writers are clearly impressed:

But the kind of deep and comprehensive reforms that China needs are always difficult to implement, given that they necessarily affect vested interests. In order to win public support for reforms, thereby maximizing the chances of success, the government must offer clear, accessible explanations of its goals. … The Research Center takes a holistic approach to the reform process, viewing it as both a systemic change and a change of mindset. Translating its proposals – which are as profound as Deng Xiaoping’s 1978 reforms – into simple, straightforward terms is no easy feat, but one that the 383 plan handles with relative deftness.

It’s almost impossible not to read the comparison to the 1978 reforms as hyperbole, especially when it is quickly conceded that “rapid, sweeping transformation is not realistic in a country of 1.3 billion people.” Nevertheless, the proposed direction of change is clearly encouraging, most obviously because it seeks so unambiguously to deepen the market-oriented policy approach of the Reform Era, by expanding the sphere of decentralized price-sensitive decision making (while contracting the scope of political discretion).

“The ‘383’” — they explain:

… is shorthand for the plan’s content. First, the proposal describes the relationships between the Chinese economy’s three main actors: government, business, and the market. Second, it identifies eight key areas of reform: governance, competition policy, land, finance, public finance, state assets, innovation, and liberalization of international trade and finance. Third, it highlights three correlated goals: easing external pressure for domestic policy changes, building social inclusiveness through a basic social-security scheme, and reducing inefficiency, inequality, and corruption through major rural land reform.

Shanghai’s new Free-Trade Zone also gets a quick but glowing mention.

Given the near-inevitability of serious disruption in the world economy over the next few years, as well as some overdue bubble-popping in China (mostly in real estate), even a cautious crawl in the right direction looks attractive. Among the reasons not to rush anywhere is the degenerate state of monetary theory worldwide, which has lead to the adoption of disastrously misconceived policies in almost every major economy. Hedging makes a lot of sense right now.

Once the macroeconomic house of cards collapses, there will be space for sounder ideas to re-emerge. Judging by China’s accumulation of (both public and private) precious metal holdings, along with its flexible approach to new (and ‘hard’) digital currency, the intellectual germs of a near-future post-fiat monetary regime could already be in place. That would really be something solid to build upon.

ADDED: “China will deepen its economic reform to ensure that the market will play a ‘decisive’ role in allocating resources, according to a communique issued after the third plenary session of the 18th CPC Central Committee …” (Xinhua)

Confused Westerners, wondering how the Xi-Li leadership’s quasi-Maoist political initiatives square with its commitment to economic reform, will find their quandaries resolved by Zachary Keck’s excellent analysis in The Diplomat. Regardless of liberal assumptions to the contrary, enforcing Central Party discipline on China’s regional fiefdoms is tightly aligned with the reform agenda. (Realism in this regard is advanced by the acknowledgement that authoritarian liberalization is the only kind there has ever been, anywhere.)

Xi and the central Party’s authority over local leaders will go a long way toward determining the scope and extent of the economic reforms China undertakes in the years ahead. Xi and Li have both made it clear that they understand the nature of reforms China needs to sustain growth. Their ability to act on this understanding is a different matter entirely. Although they will face stiff resistance from many segments of society, local leaders are notable in that they are involved in nearly every major area of reform. […] Thus, overcoming local government resistance will be a crucial part of Xi’s ability to undertake the necessary economic reforms. Xi and the central leadership seem to understand this given their year-long effort to consolidate their control over provincial and other local leaders.

(The entire article is excellent — read it all.)

Panda-hugger Martin Jacques on the global tide:

A month ago, China overtook the US to become the largest economy in the world by one measure. By 2030 it is projected that the Chinese economy will be twice as large as America’s and larger than the European Union and America combined, accounting for one third of global GDP. This is the world that is coming into being, that we must learn to adapt to and thrive in. It is a far cry from the comfort zone we are used to, a globe dominated by the West and Japan: in the Seventies, between them they were responsible for two thirds of global GDP; by 2030 it will be a mere one third

During the preponderant part of the modern period, China’s civilizational competences were oriented to keeping the Pandora’s box of runaway modernization firmly sealed. Western intervention put an end to that, and the escape is now almost certainly irreversible. That is why, in broad outline, Jacques’ prognosis is correct. An accommodation to fate is in order.

(‘Doom’ — as tagged — means no more than fate, as we have begun to explain, or at least to explore.)

China is reaching the end of its current (post-1979) growth process, argues Michael Pettis, and the direction it takes next will be decided in large part by its approach to the country’s debt over-hang. Dismissing glib talk about a magical ‘socialization’ of the debt-burden, Pettis insists that the problem of assigning losses is irreducible, and the only serious question is where these costs will be concentrated. Irrespective of the specific policy mechanisms selected, there is essentially a three-way-option: someone has to pay, and it will either be the country’s households, its small-and-medium enterprises (SMEs), or its large state-owned enterprises (SOEs).

Of course if the losses are assigned to the household sector, China cannot rebalance and it will be more than ever dependent on investment to drive growth. This is why I reject absolutely the argument that because China resolved the last banking crisis “painlessly”, it can do so again.

[… ] Beijing can also assign the losses to SMEs. In effect this is what it started to do in 2010-11 when wages rose sharply (SMEs tend to be labor intensive). It is widely recognized that SMEs are the most efficient part of the Chinese economy, however, and that assigning the losses to them will undermine the engine of China’s future productivity growth.

[…] Finally Beijing can assign the losses to the state sector, by reforming the houkou [sic] system, land reform, interest rate and currency reform, financial sector governance reform, privatization, etc. Most of the Third Plenum reforms are simply ways of assigning the cost of rebalancing, which includes the recognition of earlier losses, to the state sector. This is likely however to be politically difficult. China’s elite generally benefits tremendously from control of state sector assets, and they are likely to resist strongly any attempt to assign to them the losses.

According to Pettis’ (non-predictive) analysis, re-igniting Chinese growth in a new phase will be inseparable from an intra-establishment struggle over the responsibility of the SOEs to cover the legacy costs of the country’s economic reformation to date. Status quo resistance to this compelling developmental logic is sure to provide critical context for the actions of China’s new Xi-Li administration, as it consolidated power among unusually challenging circumstances.

If street protest in Hong Kong continues on its present course, a lot of people are going to get hurt, for nothing.

If Beijing doesn't give in, looks bad in front of world. If does, whole China knows protesting works, ricks rule. How`d you choose to act?

— Offbeat China (@OffbeatChina) September 29, 2014

Fear people on the Hong Kong streets don't understand what they are dealing with

— Bill Bishop (@niubi) September 28, 2014

Asking excited students to take a step back, and think, doesn’t have a great track record of success. The alternative, however, is catastrophic. The window of opportunity for sanity to prevail is closing fast.

ADDED: No doubt politically incorrect, but admirably pithy:

Dear Hong Kong, Democracy sucks. Go back to work.

— Henry Dampier (@henrydampier) September 29, 2014

At ChinaFile, following the World Internet Conference, in Wuzhen, a fascinating discussion — by English-speaking foreigners — on what is arguably the crucial issue of the 21st century: How will China ‘manage’ its relationship with the Internet? It is hard to imagine a problem which throws economic and political agendas into more turbulent conflict with each other, or one that more clearly reveals the ultimate nonlinear dependencies between the two. The entire ideological history of the world seems to be lensed through it, just as the future of the world ‘will be’* decided by how it works out.

Some useful background, conveying the sheer scale and dynamism of the Chinese Internet, can be found here. As the ChinaFile commentators make clear, this is a topic howling with paradox-torsion — and thus one peculiarly liable to unleash creative surprises.

* Scare quotes included to fend off Templexity pedants (this blog’s cute alternative to grammar Nazis).

Even skeptics (such as this blog) can note the importance of the discussion initiated here:

Soviet Union had cinema, the PRC has the Internet.

I personally think that the international audience still largely underestimate the importance of what China has achieved policy-wise for the global landscape of Internet. Concepts like “digital sovereignty” that were proposed by China are now emerging from post-Snowden discussions in proposals at the highest levels in EU countries. Russia has already embraced it. Of course, the US industry still need the myth of a “global village” to push products worldwide. Still, I am curious to see how it evolves as the ad market will continue to shrink, and as foreign relationships with the US are likely to get less friendly in the next years. While EU and other countries (esp in Africa and South America) start realizing that the US-first model of the Internet is too much a disadvantage for them, the only other real-world case they can turn to is China. In many regards, China looks like the future of the Internet. …

It’s tempting for Westerners (and especially Anglos) to see Chinese government Internet policy as simply backward. That’s almost certainly an inadequate framework for making sense of the most explosive Web-growth in the world.

Among other developments, there’s this:

Whatever the administrative obstacles on the path of the Chinese Internet, the basic infrastructure of the coming robot-facilitated e-commerce system seems to be coming together remarkably smoothly. For instance, this.

(This might be UF’s favorite advertisement of all time.)

More here, and here.

Telecommercial drone-logistics (and the idiots wanted flying cars).

Urbit perspective on the Chinese century:

The closest thing to a general-purpose personal server today is probably the Chinese service WeChat. If you don’t know much about WeChat, you should really watch this NYT video.

Catch-up would be sensible. (Abandoning the bizarre Western prejudice that the Internet is primarily for political expression would be a start.)

Pointed criticism follows. If Urbit delivers, we could actually see some geographically-distributed competition, which is otherwise looking increasingly unlikely. 2017 should tell, apparently.

Long-anticipated, and now officially recognized:

The Chinese economy just overtook the United States economy to become the largest in the world. For the first time since Ulysses S. Grant was president, America is not the leading economic power on the planet.

The International Monetary Fund recently released the latest numbers for the world economy. And when you measure national economic output in “real” terms of goods and services, China will this year produce $17.6 trillion — compared with $17.4 trillion for the U.S.A. […] As recently as 2000, [the US] produced nearly three times as much as the Chinese.

To put the numbers slightly differently, China now accounts for 16.5% of the global economy when measured in real purchasing-power terms, compared with 16.3% for the U.S. […] This latest economic earthquake follows the development last year when China surpassed the U.S. for the first time in terms of global trade. […]

… the moment came sooner than … predicted. China’s recent decision to bring gross domestic product calculations in line with international standards has revealed activity that had previously gone uncounted.

I’m expecting more discomfort than triumphalism from a China that is being pushed into the lime-light faster than it is ready for. The political advantages of catch-up might not match the economic ones, but they are by no means inconsiderable.

Some gentle snark from Glenn Reynolds: “Well, in recent years both China and the United States have been fundamentally transformed.”

Strictly gossip-level, but the bold predictions gets it a mention. It’s Breitbart, so understatement isn’t going to feature:

San Francisco, heartland of wacky progressive politics but also home to some of America’s most innovative technology companies, is in trouble. Not just trouble, actually, but serious shit. […] And the main reason is China. The Wall Street Journal has a good explainer on what’s going on over there, but the basic thing you need to understand is that a lot of glossy American stocks are about to take a tumble, especially tech stocks.

The core of the analyis:

Fear and greed run the stock market, which is, of course, exactly as it should be: they’re the instincts upon which capitalism is built. But that’s a problem for companies who suffer dramatically when global events conspire to shunt investors into safer bets. […] Businesses like Twitter and Facebook have always been grotesquely overvalued, according to conventional analyses. Technology companies get away with hilarious valuations mainly thanks to upward pressure; the inflation happens right at the start when companies raise hundreds of millions of dollars on multimillion dollar valuations, despite not earning a penny in revenue and having no immediate plans to do so. […] That’s in outrageous contradiction to their price-to-earnings ratio, one traditional and very reliable way of valuing companies. […] Tech stocks have absurdly high price-to-earnings ratios, and any blip in the market has a much bigger effect on high PE stocks than low PE stocks. So investors are counting on massive future growth that will likely never come and betting against global events that shave billions off the value of frothy investments.

It could get a little rough.

China is bailing out of US Treasury paper (ZH reports).

Can Expo live again?

Different truths are ‘harsh’ to different people. For Chinese, one truth so harsh that it escaped public recognition at the moment where it most mattered is that almost nobody, outside the country, cared very much about the 2010 World Expo. By the time China eagerly but belatedly seized its chance to take up the torch for this global festival of modern civilization, Expo’s epoch of radiant significance had passed. Harsher still: this was the basic fact, and principal conditioning reality of the event, rippling with ominous implications for the future of modernity and the international response to China’s re-awakening. Ameliorating it are more shadowy, contrary truths – first among them that Shanghai had already discounted a tired world’s Expo indifference, and worked around it, in order to make the event into an opportunity for something else, and for itself.

The history of World Expo, from London’s Great Exhibition of 1851, is too abundantly documented to rehearse here. The basic pattern, however, is not difficult to outline, since it conforms to a relatively smooth curve from meteoric rise (1851-1940) into gradual decay (1958 onwards), almost perfectly tracking the trajectory of modernist optimism, from its ignition in the promethean forge of industrial revolution through to its expiry in postmodern / postcolonial cynicism, elite masochism, and apologia.

Importantly, this has remained an essentially Western story, despite the consistent globalism of its cultural ambitions. The ascent of Western, globalizing, industrial capitalism, in its European and American waves, was reflected in World Exhibitions of heart-stopping glory. The crisis and decline of the West – both relative and absolute — has thrown the event into marginality, neglect, and self-doubt, clasped in the death-grip of an embittered and self-mortifying anti-modernism. Most crucially — and astoundingly — the long-evident dawning of the historical revitalizing and frenetically modernizing ‘Asian Century’ seems to have had a negligible impact upon the declinist ‘Grand Narrative’ incarnated in World Expo, which has plunged ever deeper into twitchily gesticulating, hypersensitive panic at the supposed social and environmental calamity of modernistic growth.

The irony of this situation merits explicit emphasis. Precisely when globalization shifted from questionable aspiration and ideology to definite historical fact, with the emergence of robust, non-Western economic development cores, first in Pacific East Asia, then South Asia, and beyond, the project of cosmopolitan modernization underwent a seemingly irremediable delegitimation in the court of approved ‘world’ opinion. Apparently, if the West cannot any longer strut across the world stage with invincible and unchallenged confidence, the only acceptable alternative option is hair-shirts for all. If this epitome of triumphant dog-in-the-manger resentment does not exemplify ‘cultural hegemony’ at its most potent and most toxic, it is hard to imagine what might.

An overwhelming abundance of public evidence attests to the implacable momentum of Expo degeneration, although most of this data resists tidy quantification. Since the end of World War II, the original purpose of the event, which was to promote industrial modernization worldwide through a comprehensive public exhibition of advanced productive technologies, structural engineering, manufactures, and commodities, has been progressively phased-out, to be replaced by an agenda that reflects the concerns of inter-governmental bureaucracies, national diplomatic services, and tourism boards. Public relations displays have been systematically substituted for technological exhibitions, and the number of significant mechanical and product innovations achieving popular exposure through Expo – once substantial — has fallen to near-zero. Expo themes have been steadily stripped of their associations with accumulative materialism and refashioned into earnest exhortations for moral and social transformation, as an event that was initially designed to celebrate modernity has increasingly come to apologize for it. Predictably enough, this bureaucratically-alchemized transmutation of a festival into lament has been accompanied by a precipitous collapse of popular interest and engagement. Audiences that once flooded in to catch a vision of the future, now avoid an event that musters all the allure of a United Nations teach-in.

In the West, this is all tediously familiar. Scarcely anyone pays attention to Expo anymore, or cares much about it. Perhaps most, if jolted into an opinion on the matter, would vaguely approve of the politically correct course the event has taken, although not sufficiently, of course, to ever entertain the prospect of attending one. After all, few Westerners believe in modernity anymore, world trends distress them, and Expo seems roughly as relevant to their anxieties as the prospect of Mars colonization.

In the East, things are more puzzling. Societies undergoing rapid modernistic development make natural Expo hosts, as demonstrated consistently throughout the history of the event. There has never been a great World Expo that has not broadly corresponded to a moment of exceptional national and urban flourishing. Why, then, has Expo not undergone a profound Asiatic revitalization, restoring it to former glories? Why has the western Pacific Rim not captured Expo, re-tooling it into a promotional vehicle for its own developmental prospects, as America did in the early 20th century?

Weighed by sheer visitor numbers, the two largest World Expos in history have been East Asian. Yet the moribund, guilt-wracked pathos of Occidental decline continues to dominate the event. Japan spent its Expo 1970 attempting to prove that it could out-do even the West in growth-sapping sanctimoniousness (as its economy would later demonstrate), whilst the mood in post-Expo 2010 Shanghai seems remarkably devoid of any euphoric sense of accomplishment, and more akin to that which might be expected from a group of schoolchildren freshly escaped from an abnormally-uninspired six-month lecture on ethically-guided behavioral rectification, delivered by an international Mandarinate. Having just executed the largest discrete event in human history, the predominant feelings are dutiful relief and anticlimax, numbed by something like deliberate amnesia. In any case, there’s Shanghai to get on with, so why waste time remembering Expo? Doesn’t that just stink up the joint with the odor of Western death?

(Some suggestions, tentative answers, still more downside, and a lot more upside, to come.)

Expo transformers – the uninvited guests

What was inside the UK national pavilion at Expo 2010? Did anyone get in there? Maybe they could pass on the inside dope? Because one thing is for sure, if ‘Anglosphere’ cultural resonances mean anything, expectations can be pitched down to sub-basement levels. Like the UK, Australia did a good — even excellent job – with the outside of its pavilion, but its exhibition was, to be brutally frank, a disgrace. Vacuous, patronizing, revoltingly sentimental, and despicably cowardly – details would be nice, of course, but actually there weren’t any — it served to perfectly illustrate the collapse of Expo, from a festival of dynamic modernization to a whining indulgence in modernity’s most destructive cultural pathologies. Where once an exhibition, whether corporate or national, boldly declared: “This is what we’re doing (isn’t it magnificent?),” now they exhaust their attenuated energies exploring new, although consistently unimaginative, ways of saying “sorry.” Narcissistic guilt flaps pointlessly about the exhibition space like a shoal of stranded fish, dying on a beach.

Incredibly, the USA pavilion was even worse. Not only was the pavilion itself a prefabricated strip-mall insult, unworthy of comparison with a second-tier Wallmart, but the exhibition inside took the obsequious pandering of the Australians to a whole new level. We wanted a space shuttle or a predator drone and they gave us Hillary Clinton saying “ni hao” plus some nonsense about planting flower-beds in the ghetto. Anyone who left this pavilion without deep and abiding detestation for everything America represented itself as being probably thinks Barney is a pretty cool guy. This was the society once capable of staging the Chicago Expo of 1893, the New York Expos of 1939-40 and 1964-5, of making incredible things and exhibiting them, of depicting a compelling vision of the future, and now … morbid Spenglerian reflections were inescapable.

Wandering amongst these monuments to misdirection, bland meaninglessness, sugary PR, and piteous ‘please-don’t-hate-me’ concessions to the strident anti-modernist moralism of the age – which is to say, to sheer, ruinous decadence — consciousness pixilated out into semi-random dot-pattern, swirled kaleidoscopically by a storm of frustration that could only be relieved by barking out at the local Expo authorities, and beyond them at the city, country, and region that was hosting this event “Could you please stop being so danged polite!”

The West is obviously spiraling down the drain, and what it needs, above anything, is some inspiring competition. In particular, and in 2010, it needed a western Pacific Rim, full-throttle development, blazing-a-path-to-the-future Expo that – purely by inevitable implication – maximized the humiliation of the senescent ‘developed’ world and jolted it with the roughest imaginable type of tough love from its path of decline. (Of course, the societies most in need of this shock therapy are too lost in the enthralling minutiae of their own degeneration to have noticed it, but still …) Instead, Expo 2010 remained scrupulously courteous, deferential to deeply decayed Expo traditions, and respectful of the multicultural piety that even the most wretched examples of systematic social failure have a dignity of their own. What it lacked was a massive injection of pure, unselfconscious, ethno-historical arrogance, based on unmoderated confidence in what was being achieved.

Perhaps this can be stated even more offensively: modernization should make people feel bad. Its most altruistic or epidemic function is to so thoroughly deride and humiliate all of those who are failing to modernize that eventually, after every excuse and projection has been attempted and exhausted, behavior is changed. Backwardness is made shameful, and thus corrected. That’s how history works. It began that way among the jig-saw principalities of Renaissance Europe, it worked that way in Japan (bringing modernization with the Meiji restoration), in China, long denigrated for its ‘stagnant Confucianism’, now big mummy of the Dragon economies, in India, finally lashed psychologically out of its absurd ‘Hindu rate of growth’ by the China model, and everywhere else that has ever climbed out of complacent sloth onto the developmental fast track. It’s long overdue to start happening in the West, because what has been happening there — for the best part of a century now — simply isn’t working, and this chronic social failure is nowhere near clear, painful, or embarrassing enough to the populations concerned.

Nothing would be better for the West than to have its nose rubbed in its own decay, the more abusively and insensitively the better. In order to accelerate the process, the entire treasure chest of colonial condescension should be re-opened and rummaged through, searching for whatever will best aggravate, provoke, and catalyze transformation, perhaps with strong insinuations of racial and cultural inferiority thrown in for spice. The lesson of history is that the human species is comfortable with inertia, and generally more than happy to gradually degenerate. One of the few things that ever stops people, and turns them around, is the transparent contempt trickling down from other, more dynamic societies. If Expo needs a ‘social dimension’, that’s it.

No doubt 2010 is still too recent for alternative or counter-factual history, for an Expo-punk (or X-punk) genre, searching out everything that might have been re-animated through the event — but the venture is irresistible. Call it Asia Unleashed 2010, an utterly impolite assertion of new socio-geographical realities that expresses, in raw and overwhelming style, the central truth of the age: the simultaneous de-westernization and radical re-invigoration of modernity.

Asia Unleashed could have borrowed heavily from the actual Expo 2010, adopting almost everything that was created by the host, in fact, and much else beside. The China Pavilion, Theme Pavilions, Urban Best Practices Area, Expo Cultural Center, Expo Center, Expo Boulevard, Expo Museum, and site landscaping, as well as the Shipping Pavilion, GM/SAIC Pavilion and exhibition, Telecoms Pavilion, Oil Pavilion, Shanghai Corporate Pavilion with all its stuff, Coca Cola Pavilion, plenty of the international pavilion designs, and even a few of the internal exhibitions … all keepers. What gets laughed out are the schmaltzy public relations videos, the sorry, sorry, really truly sorry song and dance act, the weren’t we awful performance, the Kumbaya Pavilion, the Environmental Hypersensitivity Pavilion, the Victimological Grievance Pavilion, the Beyond Growth Pavilion, the There Must Be A Gentler Way Pavilion, any national or corporate pavilion without exhibition objects (roughly half), almost everything bearing the imprint of tourist boards, media studies graduates, or diplomatic services, and every usage of solar panels that isn’t strictly tailored to commercial exploitation on a massive scale. In addition, any national pavilion based entirely on ethnic kitsch gets grouped together with others of its kind in an exotic tourism area, because it’s admitting to a complete absence of creative capability and needs to be mocked. No robots, no platform: that’s the rule.

Asia Unleashed also needs a lot of things brought in, most of all machines. Expo is all about machines, even though every Expo over the last half-century has been pitifully deficient in this regard. It scarcely needs mentioning that the entire Expo site should be pulsing, crawling, and twitching with robots of every type and scale, from industrial goliaths, automated submarines and space vehicles, through charismatic androids, to intelligent household appliances, Go players, robopets, and insectiform mechanisms. To push the process along, those countries and corporations with the laziest robot exhibits can be publicly ridiculed over the PA system.

Expo is an exhibition, and its historical sickness is perfectly tracked by the degeneration of this elementary conception into PR. Organizers at all levels, from the pinnacle of the international Expo bureaucracy (BIE) downwards, clearly need to be forcefully reminded of the difference. For instance, video technology is an entirely suitable object for Expo display, and videos themselves can quite appropriately play a supportive, informative role. To center an ‘exhibition’ upon videos, however, especially when they have been put together, using state-of-the-art advertising techniques, with the entire purpose of selling a national or corporate brand through image associations and spin, is a complete abnegation of responsibility and should straightforwardly be banned, or at least boycotted, derided, and rendered ineffective through inundating contempt. The only acceptable center of an Expo display is an object, preferably astonishing, fetched from the outer edge of industrial capability in order to concretely represent the trajectory of material progress. Displaying such objects – and thereby respecting audiences sufficiently to evaluate them for themselves – is the non-negotiable, basic function of Expo as an institution. If it can no longer accept this task, it should be terminated (by a giant robot, if possible).

Asia Unleashed is dedicated to the latest and impending phases of global industrial civilization, which should be more-or-less implicit in the fact that it is a World Expo, although sadly, it isn’t. There’s plenty of room for artworks and other singular cultural creations, but the emphasis is edgily modernistic. Green technology gets in because it’s technology, and the tourism industry gets in because it’s an industry, but in both cases the spin-meisters have been reined back hard, and the preliminary question insistently raised: “What, really, are you exhibiting here?” The only organizers who get to avoid such suspicious interrogations are the ones overseeing the erection of some fabulous structure that looks as if it comes from the set of a science fiction movie, or unloading partially-animated assemblages of glistening metal from mountainous stacks of shipping containers, because – clearly – they understand what an Expo is all about. The cyclopean space elevator anchor station, taking shape in the Extraterrestrial Resources Exploitation Zone, serves as a model for the guiding spirit of the festival. The machinery in the 3D printing pavilion printed the pavilion.

The mining industry employs monster trucks weighing 203 tonnes, with a capacity to carry 360 tonnes, they cost US$3 million each, their tires are four-meters in diameter, and driving one is like “driving a house” – why on earth didn’t Expo 2010 have one? Asia Unleashed most certainly would. For developed countries with the resources to put on an impressive show at Expo there needs to be something like a price for admission, and an awe-inspiring piece of industrial machinery fits the bill exactly. The Canadian tar sands are being criss-crossed by these monster trucks, and the Canada national pavilion should have been strongly advised to bring one over. Instead they brought … (hands up if anyone remembers).

All the imagination that has been squandered over decades in utopian speculations of the “another world is possible” type has been far more productively employed at Asia Unleashed, counter-balancing the tendency of advanced industrial capabilities to flee from the arena of spectacle. The monumental achievements and consequences of intensely miniaturized and softened technologies demand exhibition, from silicon chip fabrication, gene sequencing, and rudimentary nanotechnology, to cryptosystems, social networks, digital microfinance, and virtual architecture, even as they slip through their inner inexorable logic into invisibility. To present these frontiers of industrial capability rapidly, dramatically, and memorably to a highly-diverse, transient Expo audience requires the application of creative intelligence on a massive scale. The growing challenges of this task are worthy of the rising computer-augmented talents brought to bear upon it.

Asia Unleashed never happened, of course, partly because the international Expo institutional apparatus is locked into the Occidental death-slide, but mostly because it would have been impolite. Ultimately, postmodernist multicultural political correctness – today’s hegemonic globalist ideology — is an elaborate etiquette, designed to prevent the ‘insensitive’ identification and diagnosis of failure, and to elude, indefinitely, the blunt statement: “What you’re doing doesn’t work.” No Expo that remained true to its deep institutional traditions could avoid such a statement arising, implicitly, through contrast. Hence, Expo has been condemned to die, by inertial forces too profound for Expo 2010 to fully arrest, let alone reverse: Better decayed than rude.

From the wreckage of the Expo institution, however, Expo 2010 was able to extract, polish, and resuscitate a crucial modernist topic: the city as engine of progress. More on that in Part 3.

What makes a great city?

By far the most interesting element of World Expo 2010: Shanghai, was Shanghai. Whilst deeply-rooted regional traditions of courtesy sustained the fiction that this World Fair was about the world, it really wasn’t. Whatever the diplomatic benefits of the almost universally convenient internationalist pretense, to China and Expo’s foreign participants alike, Expo 2010 was about Shanghai, and for Shanghai. The Expo was global because Shanghai is, it was about China because Shanghai is China’s gateway to the world, it was about cities in order to be even more about Shanghai, nobody uninterested in Shanghai paid it the slightest attention, and Shanghai used it to restructure, intensify, and promote itself.

Expo as an institution was in decline before 2010, and continues to decline. Shanghai was rising before 2010, and continues to rise, but now infrastructurally upgraded, thoroughly renovated, and decorated with the historical merit-badge of Expo hospitality. Better City, Better Life, a typically airy and aspirational Expo theme, is a cold-sober description of the Expo-effect in Shanghai.

Cities are, in certain important respects, generic. There is such a thing as ‘the city in general’ as the work of Geoffrey West, in particular, has demonstrated. We know, thanks to West, that cities are negative organisms, with consistent scaling characteristics that structurally differentiate them from animals and corporations. As they grow they accelerate and intensify at a quantifiable and predictable rate, exhibiting increasing returns to scale (in sharp contrast to animals and businesses, which slow down in proportion to their size). Organisms and firms die normally and by necessity, cities only rarely and by accident.

Cities belong to a real genre, but they are also singularities, undergoing spontaneous individuation. In fact, they are generically singular – singular without exception – like black holes. It is not only that no city is like another, no city can be like another, and this is a feature that all cities share, arguably more than any other.

Beyond such generic singularity, there is an additional level of enhanced differentiation that emerges from the position cities occupy within larger systems. These systems are not only internally specialized, but also hierarchical, dividing core from periphery, and distributing influence unevenly between them. Ultimately, within the fully global incarnation of the ‘world system’, cities acquire secondary metropolitan characteristics, to very different degrees, in accordance with their geographical and functional proximity to the center of the world. They transcend their local histories, to become hubs or nodes in a global network that re-characterizes them as parts of a whole rather than wholes made of parts, as metropolis-versus-periphery rather than (or on top of) metropolis-versus-town.

The geographical structure and historical instability of modernity’s core-periphery architecture has been the focus of the ‘world system theory’ developed from the Annales School of Fernand Braudel (1902-85) by Immanuel Wallerstein (1930-) and – most impressively — Giovanni Arrighi (1937-2009). According to the world system theorists, the revolutions that matter most are not national regime changes, such as those in France (1789) and Russia (1917), but rather global re-organizations that mark out the basic phases of modern history, jolting the world into new core-periphery structures. Modernity has undergone four of these shifts up to the present, with each phase lasting for a ‘long century’, introducing a new core state, or hegemon, with enhanced capabilities, and a new urban center – successively, Venice, Amsterdam, London, and New York – that operate as an effective capital of the world.

As the example of New York attests, this status is not primarily political. Nor does prominence in manufacturing seem to be a relevant factor (the ‘world capital’ has never been the dominant industrial center of its respective region or state). Over the course of modern history to date, the crucial features of the world capital seem to be that it is the largest urban agglomeration in the leading (‘hegemonic’) region or state; that it is an established financial center that quite rapidly attains a position of global pre-eminence in this respect; that it is an open port city with clear maritime orientation; and that it has an exceptionally internationalized demographic profile, with a large segment of internationally-mobile, opportunistic residents. A significant period of leadership in the creative arts might plausibly be added to this list. Functionally, the world capital serves as the supreme nerve-center of the global economy, specialized nationally, and then super-specialized internationally, as the financial, logistics, and business services hub of a system whose global integrity is reflected in the city’s privileged singularity.

The exceptional drama of our age lies in its nature as a time of transition between phases of modernity, somewhere in the winter of a long century, when an epoch of hegemony is exhausted. More specifically, the walls are closing in on the American Age, as commentators of almost every intellectual and ideological stripe are increasingly aware. Overstretched, essentially bankrupted, politically paralyzed and disillusioned, America sinks into self-conscious crisis, its mood dark and clouded. It would be a mistake to limit attention to America, however, because the crisis is world-systemic, heralding the end of an international order that arose among the chaos of the world wars and achieved definition in the post-WWII United Nations and Bretton Woods institutions (IMF, World Bank, and the descendent of GATT, now the WTO). It affects not only the role of the US dollar as international reserve currency, an Atlantic-centered NATO and an Occidentally-skewed UN apparatus, but also the European Union, the post-colonial Middle Eastern state-system and (very) much else besides.

Over the next two decades, under the impact of economic forces of extreme profundity (far exceeding the responsive capacity of existing institutions), a revolutionary re-ordering of the world can be expected to unfold. If America succeeds in maintaining its position of leadership within the global system for a period that significantly exceeds the long 20th century (which began no earlier than 1914, and thus might be expected to persist for some additional years), it will have broken a pattern that has remained consistent throughout a half-millennium of history. Whilst not strictly impossible, perpetuation of the present hegemonic order would be, quite literally, a stretch.

Another vision of a break from historical precedent, this time transparently utopian, envisages – rather than the continuation of US pre-eminence — the obsolescence of the core-periphery global structure in its entirety, ending hierarchical geography and hegemony in general. Even If such a vision truly rises to the level of a definite expectation (rather than a nebulous exercise in wishful thinking), it remains ungrounded in reliable historical and theoretical foundations. Altruistic political intentions – were such ever credible – would still be quite insufficient to overcome the spontaneous, dynamic trend to approximate world systemic equilibrium, in which a core zone, and its metropolitan capital, are automatically nominated, by diffuse economic currents searching for a central clearing house.

Whilst no doubt deeply disappointing to utopian eschatology, and to all dreams of historical conclusion (or passage to the promised land), phase-shifts in the world-system are less ominous than they are often depicted as being. Among Arrighi’s most important insights is the reminder that whenever an attempted reconstruction of the world order has been based upon a frontal military and geo-strategic challenge to the hegemon, it has failed. This is exemplified, above all, by the German and Russian histories of the 19th and 20th centuries, in which repeated direct confrontations with the established Anglophone-dominated international system led only to frustration, regime collapse, and subaltern re-integration.

Perhaps ironically, a marked subjective aversion to hard power assertion and the assumption of hegemony can be quite reliably taken as a positive indicator for the objective emergence of hegemonic status. Holland, Great Britain, and the United States of America were all, in certain crucial respects, accidental imperialists, whose successive ascents to world dominance shared a prioritization of commercial motives, retarded state involvement, strong ‘isolationist’ and ‘anti-imperialist’ cultural currents, and a determined avoidance of ‘Clauswitzean’ decisive collision (especially with the prior hegemon). The British and American ways of war, in particular, are notable for their common emphasis upon hedging and triangulation, such as the exploitation of offshore position and maritime supremacy to avoid premature entanglement in high intensity ‘continental’ conflicts, the usage of financial and logistic capability to manipulate conflicts at a distance, and the diplomatic inclusion of defeated adversaries in reconstructed, poly-centric, ‘balanced’ systems of power. Hegemony was, in each case, peacefully inherited, even when it was cemented by war (in partnership with the previous hegemon) and later gave rise to opportunities for increasingly aggressive imperialistic adventurism.

Given this broadly uncontroversial historical pattern, it is all the more surprising that the German example is so widely invoked in discussions of China’s ‘peaceful rise’. In fact, China’s ascent has stuck far closer to the model of hegemonic hand-overs than to that of confrontational challenges, as indicated by the prioritization of commercial development, the highly cooperative (even synergistic or ‘Chimerican’) relationship with the prevailing hegemon, the gradual accumulation of financial power by way of spontaneous, systemic re-distribution, and the equally gradual consolidation of maritime interests, emerging out of the global trading system, which draw the focus of government strategic policy – perhaps reluctantly – from domestic concerns out into the high-seas.

Historically, China has been far more a continental than a maritime power, and this fact provides the single most persuasive objection to the assumption of an impending Chinese (Long) Century. The emergence of a continental world system core would be as decisive a departure from precedent as any yet discussed, and if such a possibility is entertained, disciplined prediction falters. If inverted, however, this problem becomes a forecast in itself: the trajectory of China’s rise necessarily implies its transformation into a maritime power (an insight already tacit in the controversial 1988 Chinese TV series River Elegy).

A vague intuition, partially but elusively crystallized by Expo 2010, is now precipitated by sheer historical pattern-recognition into the form of an explicit question:

Is Shanghai destined to become the capital of the world?
(Part 4 to come)

What does the world make of Shanghai?

If the deepest traditions of the World Expo are those cemented into its origin, it would be incautious to over-hastily dismiss one prominent feature of its inaugural instance. The Great Exhibition of the Works of Industry of all Nations, held in London, in 1851, was staged in the effective capital of the world. In this case, at least, the defining internationalism of the Expo is difficult to disentangle from the indisputable historical fact that the entire world was rapidly becoming London’s business. In a gesture of reciprocity so perfect that it approached simple identity, London invited the world to itself exactly as – and because – it was inviting itself to the world.

The Great Exhibition made irresistible sense because it put the future of the world on display in the only place that could. To see the concentrated, realistically sifted, programmatically arranged destiny of the earth, it was necessary to visit London, since it was in London that everything came together.

Over its first two decades (and four episodes), World Expo alternated between London (1851, 1862) and Paris (1855, 1867), as if oscillating between the relative historical potencies of maritime and continental power. Yet this apparent hesitation actually compresses and conceals two distinct, complementary, and unambiguous trends. Britain was ascending inexorably to global hegemony, whilst disengaging from World Expo, whilst France was managing equally inexorable comparative decline, as it made World Expo – to a remarkable extent – its special preserve.

It is tempting to propose a theory of institutional consolation to account for this pattern. Long after Britain had abandoned all claim to Expo leadership, France continued to invest heavily in the event, chalking-up a record of Expo hospitality unmatched by any other country and setting the course to Expo institutionalization through the Bureau of International Exhibitions (BIE). The BIE, established in 1928, has always been based in Paris, and remains a bastion of Anglo-French bilingualism.

French Expo-enthusiasm expresses a more general relationship to the world system of great importance. Having relinquished its (Napoleonic) role as a challenger to the world order in the early 19th century, France has maneuvered, with unique capability and determination, to remain an indispensable secondary power, or – more precisely – a balancer. Its relationship to the successive phases of Anglophone global hegemony has been guided by an extremely consistent deep policy of accommodation without acquiescence, characterized by imaginative and unrelenting, yet restrained rivalry. Close to the core, yet never quite part of it, France has been able to draw sustenance from the world order whilst contesting its cultural meaning (as English-speaking, protestant, and laissez-faire individualist).

World system challengers, it should be clearly noted, never host World Expos. The Expos held in Japan (Osaka 1970, Tsukuba 1985, Aichi 2005) and Germany (Hanover 2000) took place long after their armed resistance to the Anglo-American world order had been broken and both countries had been beaten into docility. Russia has never hosted one. Moscow of the USSR was offered the 1967 World Expo, but declined it (presumably judging it dangerously destabilizing to a closed society).

World Expo has thus acquired a secondary tradition, as a deliberately eccentric platform from which to contest the core future of the world system, and to propose a pluralized (or embryonically multicultural) alternative. Already in 1855 and 1867, and then in 1878, 1889, 1900, and 1937, World Expo staged the view from Paris, one that accepted the global reality of consolidated, revolutionary modernization, whilst systematically de-emphasizing its techno-commercial determinism and its convergence upon Anglophone cultural traits. Industrial globalization was reconfigured as a condition to be critically interrogated, rather than an opportunity to be vigorously promoted.

Between the primary and secondary impulses of the Expo, collision was inevitable. Predictably enough, the occasion was provided by the reconnection of Expo to the global core.

Even given this truncated and radically simplified schema of Expo history, which had been largely settled in its essentials by 1870, the significance of the two New York World Expos, staged in 1939-40 and 1964-5, comes clearly into focus. Mid-20th century New York, like every world systemic capital, represented the leading edge of modernization as a revolutionary global process — emergence and consolidation of a new world order and new age (novus ordo seclorum) – compared to which the authority of established international institutions counted for nothing.

Both New York Expos flagrantly violated BIE regulations in numerous respects, but even after the withdrawal of official sanction, they ahead anyway. These were, non-coincidentally, the first rogue Expos. They were also among the most memorable and influential in World Expo history.

For the first time since the mid-19th century, Expo had found its way back to the capital of the world, in order to provide an uncompromised and unambiguous foretaste of the World of Tomorrow in the place that was orchestrating it. BIE opinion mattered little, because Expo was not being hosted in New York so much as re-invented, echoing the originality of 1851. This was where the future would come from, and everyone knew it. All that was necessary was to tease the city into anticipating itself, and what resulted was a Futurama.

There was an additional message, easily overlooked due to the scarcity of data-points: hosting World Expo is one of the things the world capital has to do — as a kind of ritual responsibility, or a coming-out party. Shanghai has done that now. Precedent suggests that one additional Expo would be appropriate (perhaps in 2025, or 2030), although it might have to be unsanctioned next time.

Of course, Shanghai is not yet the capital of the world, but it is heading there. From the late-1970s, after centuries of exile and denigration, the offshore, diasporic-maritime, capitalistic China of the tianchao qimin — those ‘abandoned by the Celestial Empire’ – has been steadily, and rapidly, re-integrated with the continental mainland and its ‘market socialist’ structures. Floodgates of talent and investment have been opened, and as this scattered, sea-salt scented population has reconnected with the motherland, the ‘Chinese miracle’ of recent decades has taken place. Shanghai is the main-circuit socket that links this other China — oriented to oceanic trade, entrepreneurial opportunity, capital accumulation, international mobility, and a society of flexible networks — to the vast potentialities of the country (and flexible Sino-Marxist state) lying up the Yangzi, and beyond. If the process of reconnection is not interrupted, the next phase of modernity will be centered in this city, where China meets the sea.

Despite its self-identification as the ‘central country’ (or ‘middle kingdom’ – Zhongguo), China has not been at the core of the world process for centuries. Instead it has been a complacently declining legacy power and a badly-treated outsider, then successively a second-tier affiliate, a truculent challenger, and a cautious balancer, until its prospective status as core inheritor (or virtual hegemon) began to percolate into global popular awareness over the final decades of the 20th century. Very little of this is a matter of motivation, or strategic assertion. Quasi-Marxist assumptions of economic inevitability and directional base-superstructure causation come into their own in this respect. Global leadership is nominated by industrial reality, not political will, and hegemony can neither be perpetuated beyond the endurance of its economic foundations, nor long disdained once such foundations have been laid. Eventually a reality check becomes unavoidable, and policy is hammered into compliance with the demands of world system equilibrium. Core-periphery relations are decided by trade and capital flows, not by political declarations. Since comparative success and failure show no sign at all of disappearing, it can confidently be expected that hierarchical geography – however re-arranged – will not be withering away any time soon. Realists will follow the money.

There will be a new world capital (you can count on it), but will it be Shanghai? It would be reckless to presume so. The world system tradition, in its eagerness to anoint Tokyo as the successor to New York (during the 1980s), provides a cautionary lesson. There was no Tokyo World Expo, and it turns out that there was not an urgent or essential need for one.

So, is Shanghai next? That should have been the animating question of Expo 2010, and perhaps it will have been in the future. The whole world has a stake in it, because it tells us what is coming, and that is what World Expo was designed to do. For an emerging world capital to mask itself as a generic city passes beyond modesty into a species of accidental deception, but tact can easily be confused with pretence – especially by those on unfamiliar cultural terrain. It might be that Shanghai said everything that was necessary in 2010, and that what it said will eventually be heard, and understood.

Expo begins again in each new world capital, in 1851, in 1939, and – far more problematically – in 2010 (?). In Shanghai’s case, we are still too close to the event, and too entangled in the current revolution of modernity, to know for sure. What Expo 2010 will have been depends upon what the world becomes, how its center of economic gravity shifts, how its new center condenses, and what it makes of Shanghai.

(final lurch into this fog-bank coming next (yippee!))

The Call of Haibao

Dispatched from the British Consulate, Doctor Helen Goodwhite arrives at the Jiangnan Special Hospital for Inexplicable Foreign Devilry to interview a problematic inmate.

Dr Goodwhite: How are you feeling today Mister Vaughn? They tell me you’re quite a bit calmer.

Vaughn: OK, I guess. A little disoriented. How long …?

Dr Goodwhite: Do you remember why you’re here?

Vaughn: Not exactly.

Dr Goodwhite: Those scars on your arms, any ideas?

Vaughn: [Hesitating] Some kind of accident …?

Dr Goodwhite: I’ve got some witness reports here, all very consistent, maybe they’ll jog something. It seems that you were walking down Nanjing East Road when you suddenly started shrieking “a-ya, a-ya, a-ya” with a highly unconvincing Chinese accent before switching to English and shouting “Get out. Get out. We have to get out of the city.” After that, when nobody took any notice, you continued to ‘yell aggressively’ …Umm, let’s see [riffling through her notes], ah yes, “Haibao spawn, you’re all effing Haibao spawn, effing plague-blood zombie Haibao spawn,” and so on, considerable obscenity it appears, and then … ah, here we are “filthy future-toxed effing robot Haibao spawn, die, die, we’re all going to die” et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. Then you rushed across the street and smashed the plate-glass window of an Expo gift shop with your bare hands. [Looking up] Do you remember any of that, mister Vaughn?

Vaughn: Some of it, yes. Now you mention it. It’s coming back. But it wasn’t really like that.

Dr Goodwhite: It wasn’t?

Vaughn: Not really, no. At least, those things happened, yes …

Dr Goodwhite: They did?

Vaughn: Yes, but it’s just, what they meant … [hesitating]

Dr Goodwhite: Go on.

Vaughn: Well, they didn’t mean anything of course, what I meant to say was, well, it was sort of a mistake.

Dr Goodwhite: A ‘mistake’?

Vaughn: Yes, or, I guess, more of a misunderstanding.

Dr Goodwhite: I’m afraid you’re going to have to be a great deal more specific if we’re going to make any progress.

Vaughn: It’s rather complicated.

Dr Goodwhite: Please. Just start at the beginning.

Vaughn: I suppose it began at the pavilion.

Dr Goodwhite: The UK Expo pavilion?

Vaughn: I was working there you know.

Dr Goodwhite: It’s in the file.

Vaughn: So you know what it looked like?

Dr Goodwhite: Yes, of course.

Vaughn: The tendrils, the shimmering, the name like a taunt from … them.

Dr Goodwhite: It was called the ‘Seed Cathedral’, according to this.

Vaughn: Seed Cathedral, Sea Cthudral, whatever, it had been sent back, sent up, to show us their true ‘face’. … At least, that’s what I thought at the time, but that’s just ridiculous, isn’t it? I realize that now.

Dr Goodwhite: But at ‘the time’ you thought ‘they’ had ‘sent it back’?

Vaughn: I’d been working too hard. It was quite stressful, you know. I wasn’t sleeping well, worrying, and that’s when they began chatting.

Dr Goodwhite: Who were ‘they’ Mister Vaughn?

Vaughn: The Haibao, of course.

Dr Goodwhite: Ah yes, the Expo mascot …

Vaughn: Mask, not mascot.

Dr Goodwhite: Did you know that the Shanghai Corporate Pavilion was defaced with luminous blue paint, on the night of September the ninth? [She passes a photograph.]

Vaughn: [Shudders silently]

Dr Goodwhite: The message is rather cryptic, but your words reminded me of it, for some reason. It’s a bit difficult to read from the photo, but I’ve got a transcript. “We are many and yet singular. Our name equals 90, the seething void, enfolding artificial intelligence and the terminal alpha-omega. We come from the depths, from the blue screen at the end of the world. Cthublue.”

Vaughn: I don’t know anything about that.

Dr Goodwhite: Really?

Vaughn: It’s Haibao cultist, hardcore. I’d never touch that stuff – not ever.

Dr Goodwhite: Yet you seem to recognize it.

Vaughn: From dreams — bad, really bad, dreams. I told you, I wasn’t sleeping well. They wouldn’t stop talking, telling me things I didn’t want to hear, I couldn’t stop them. I tried, but they kept calling me.

Dr Goodwhite: Calling you to bow before the most high?

Vaughn: [Outraged] I never said that. I’d never say that. It’s absurd, obscene. It’s not even code.

Dr Goodwhite: [Checking her notes] So, you understand now that ‘hairy crab’ isn’t a secret anagram for ‘Haibao’?

Vaughn: Yes, I can see that, of course.

Dr Goodwhite: It isn’t even close, really — too many letters, for one thing.

Vaughn: Well, six and nine are rotational twins, and ‘o’ is a ‘cry’. [Sobs slightly] … It’s all nonsense. I see that now. I was confused.

Dr Goodwhite: The trouble, Mister Vaughn, is that this subject still seems to excite you rather disproportionately. I think we need to conduct a little test. Let’s see what happens when we compare this [she reaches into her bag and lifts out the statuette of a tentacle-faced abomination, sculpted long ago by some Pacific island tribe, presumed extinct] with this [a soft, cartoonish, vaguely anthropomorphic blue doll, suggestive of a toothpaste advert for children]. The similarity isn’t especially striking, is it?

Vaughn: No, no, no, no, NOOOOOOOOOO.

Dr Goodwhite: I’m sorry, what?

Vaughn: [In an almost indiscernible whisper] Deep ones.

Dr Goodwhite: I didn’t catch that.

Vaughn: From the depths, the ocean – deep ones. They’re from the sea – ‘treasure from the sea’ [laughs morbidly]. Even you have to understand that, doctor. Globalization, technocapitalism, Shanghai, alien invasion, the Thing — it could hardly be clearer. It’s escaped from the abyss, and now it’s exposed. The time has come. Sea Change, Modernity, call it whatever you want, it doesn’t matter. The Haibao will tell us how to think soon enough, and we’ll comply, because they’re behind us, beneath us, and we’ll peel away from what they always were like dead skin from a snake. They’ve shown us the ultimate city god already, so it won’t be long. Their words are arriving, whispers, mutterings …

Dr Goodwhite: [Disquieted] Oabiah nasce zhee ute ewoit.

Vaughn: Excuse me?

Dr Goodwhite: That means nothing to you?

Vaughn: Nothing.

Dr Goodwhite: Strange, then, that it’s tattooed on your arm.

Vaughn: I’ve no idea how it got there.

Dr Goodwhite: Alright, let’s move on, shall we?

Vaughn: Move where doctor? We’re already here, in the city at the end of the world, the thing that came out of the sea. We aren’t going anywhere. It’s coming for us, right now, and it can’t be stopped. What did you expect? A New Jerusalem? [laughing unpleasantly]

Dr Goodwhite: Alright Mister Vaughn, I think we’re done here. We need to get you some proper, professional attention. Then, after some rest, back to your family …

Vaughn: [Prolonged laughter, even more ghastly] Too late, doctor! Way too late. The Haibao have already taken them. It came for the children first, don’t you realize that? Do you know how many Haibao dolls my sweet little kiddies have accumulated? [Voice cracking] Seventeen! They might as well have tentacles growing out of their eye-sockets — it would all amount to the same thing. Haibao melted their souls into the blue screen months ago. That generation’s gone. Long gone. It was over even before the Haibao clones slithered out of the television set.

Dr Goodwhite: [Backing away nervously] This has been a very interesting chat, but I’ve really got to be going now. I’ll tell the consulate that … that …

Vaughn: [Zoned-out into the blue] They want to transmute us — replace us – with something unspeakable, with a bionic monstrosity from beyond the blue screen. Our metropolises are turning into, into … Actually they were never ours. The deep ones, the Haibao, were always using them to modify us, using us to make them – that’s the circuit: alien animation. It was a cosmic gamble, a bet, and now they’re raking it in …

Dr Goodwhite: [Turns pale, a hideous comprehension dawning] Better city, better life …

There’s always something huge happening in Shanghai — and usually several things. Out at the leading edge over the last two years has been the tsunami of urban development along the Huangpu waterfront to the south of the Puxi metropolitan core, in an area that has been named ‘Xuhui Riverside’ or ‘West Bund’. The scale of what is underway there is (of course) utterly stunning.

A mixture of new residential complexes and prestige towers is under construction, and the immediate waterfront has already been redeveloped into a strip of interconnected parks and boardwalks (constituting the 8.4km ‘Shanghai Corniche‘). Along the river, a neo-modern aesthetic prevails, characterized by elegantly re-purposed heavy industrial structures: slabs of concrete, disused rail tracks, and massive cargo cranes. As elsewhere in the city, the heavy-duty Shanghai 1.0 has been playfully folded over itself, in a stylish celebration of modernist heritage. The future is presented as a re-launch of the past. For anybody mesmerized by time-spirals, it’s irresistible.

The role allotted to the arts in this process of urban re-animation is especially notable. Even in a city blitzed into delirium by an explosive growth of arts space, the proliferation of galleries, theaters, museums, and other cultural centers in the West Bund comes as a scarcely-comprehensible shock. The subsonic sucking roar of this new cultural capacity, emitted in overlapping ripples as it extends its devouring appetite throughout the city and far beyond, reaches a magnitude that seems to bend space and time. There are entire national cultures in the world that would be hard-pressed to fill it.

The coming out party for this arts infrastructure was held on a suitably stupendous scale. Westbund 2013: A Biennial of Architecture and Contemporary Art included an interlocking set of exhibitions, each of which would have been dazzlingly impressive on its own. Sound Art China introduced the country’s sonic bleeding edge in its Revolutions Per Minute event, set up within four renovated oil storage tanks. The adjacent West Bund Exhibition Center — a redeveloped industrial structure of truly cyclopean proportions — hosted a multi-threaded sound / video / architecture / cinematic history show in and around a central ‘Inter-Media Megastructure’ that fully lived up to its grandiose name. A more modest urban development exhibition in a nearby warehouse space did its best to explain the epic convulsions that the area was undergoing. (I think the appropriate word is ‘awesome’, cubed.)

There’s only one reasonable conclusion: Shanghai is sheer cosmic splendor compacted for terrestrial application, and expressed through aesthetic overload. Cynicism can wait for another occasion.

Whatever else is to be learned from ‘A Dream I Dreamed’ — the Kusama Yayoi exhibition at the Museum of Contemporary Art Shanghai (Dec 15 to March 30, 2014) — the most superficially striking lesson is sociological. Shanghainese — and especially young Shanghainese — can’t get enough of this stuff. After almost two months, queues no longer regularly stretch all the way through People’s Park and out onto Nanjing Xi Lu, but they still over-spill the gallery. Both thematically and socially, this is a show about multitudes.

Kusama, born in 1929, has an artistic career stretching back to the 1950s. Throughout seven decades, as her celebrity has waxed and waned in waves, her artistic focus — or, more exactly, her strategic ‘obliteration’ of focus — has remained remarkably constant. Sensuous disintegration of self and world into dot pattern has been a continuous preoccupation.

The MoCA show concentrates upon Kusama’s very recent work, mostly from the last two years. To a general audience, the best known pieces are probably her large, brightly bi-colored, speckled pumpkins, enjoyed for their pop-art accessibility and unpretentious aestheticism. When encountered within the context of the show, however, the disciplined dot shading on these works takes on an unsuspected seriousness, as it is sucked into swirls, drifts, and flurries of dots in different colors, across picture planes and sculptured surfaces, and even into illusory volumes. Through a power of pure multiplicity, Kusama’s vivid, relentlessly cheerful pop-art chromatics become the tails of neonized guiding streaks, hurtling into cosmic vistas and shattered states of being.

Dotted tulips, dotted dogs, huge mushroom-styled dotted spheres, ‘Infinity Dots’ (2012), ‘Infinity Double Dots’ (2013), and the ‘Infinity Nets’ (numerous, 2013) created by the diffuse dot-puncturing of space … it becomes all-too easy to understand why Kusama chooses to live in a Japanese mental hospital as an OCD (obsessive compulsive disorder) patient, and why her own accounts of her work wander so uninterruptedly between aesthetics and psychopathology. Her installation ‘I’m Here, but Nothing’ (2013), consisting of a living room  suffused with violet light and blitzed with countless hallucinatory dots, provides something close to an insanity portal. Visitors entering the ‘Obliteration Room’ are handed a sheet of colorful dot stickers and invited to go crazy. It’s at once humorously and seriously dotty.

The works are typically without center, diffusing perception smoothly across sheer distribution, sometimes through spaces expanded to infinity through installed mirrors. The sense of religious suggestion is occasionally made explicit, as in ‘Transmigration’ (2011) — an ‘infinity-net’ style acrylic painting whose numinous title is only reinforced by its thematic continuity with the rest of the show. In  ‘Narcissus Garden’ (2013), a packed array of stainless steel spheres, mirroring and the assembly of featureless particles are finally fused (although this work is more notable for its neat infolding of Kusama’s artistic vocabulary than for its aesthetic power). To immerse ‘oneself’ in this exhibition is to be strewn across the void, lost in clouds, and in crowds.

Kusama’s appeal manifests an East Asian  ‘pop’ sensibility that clearly works in Shanghai, attesting once again to the influence of contemporary Japanese culture throughout the region, and to the continued relevance of common religious traditions. Beyond — or simply through — the deliberate frivolity of this work, something profound, and shattering, is being shared. It’s well worth adding yourself to the crowds.

Might urbanization be the leading theme of China’s 5^th generation CCP administration? The background to this question is the process of Chinese urbanization itself. Over the three decades of Reform and Opening, China’s urban population rose from 20% to 53% of the (rising) total, resulting in over half a billion new urbanites. The economic and geostrategic consequences of this transformation have profoundly re-structured the world. (It is the central fact of the Pacific-centered Modernity 2.0.)

In the Atlantic, Matt Schiavenza communicates the basics:

In China, economic growth and urbanization have gone hand in hand. When Deng Xiaoping initiated Reform and Opening in 1978, the vast majority of the population lived and worked in the countryside — just as Chinese people had for centuries. But over the past three and a half decades, as special economic zones churned out exports and China modernized its cities, hundreds of millions of people migrated to urban areas seeking work in the manufacturing and service sectors. This … has made China — and the Chinese — much wealthier.

The guideline themes of China’s 4^th generation CCP leadership – ‘harmonious society’ and ‘scientific development’ – were no doubt sculpted by the stresses and policy challenges of massive urbanization, but they addressed the phenomenon indirectly. There are numerous indications that a more specifically-focused emphasis upon urbanization is now emerging. In particular, China’s new Premier Li Keqiang envisages the topic as a nexus, where many of the country’s development and governance issues meet.

The Chinese journal Qiushi published an article on urbanization by Li Keqiang in its Winter 2012 issue (translated into English by He Shan and Chen Xia here). Framed by the expectation (attributed to “Foreign economists”) “that China’s urbanization and U.S. high technology would emerge as twin engines of the global economy in the 21st century,” it rewards close scrutiny.

The analysis of Michael Pettis, who identifies insufficient domestic consumption (by households) as China’s pre-eminent economic obstacle, is a valuable preparation for this discussion, which begins: “Urbanization has the greatest potential for boosting domestic demand.” Li argues that China remains relatively under-urbanized, so the propulsion to “exponential urban growth” continues, with at least partially predictable implications. Since “urban residents spent 3.6 times more than rural dwellers in 2010” it can be confidently anticipated that consumer spending will rise as a function of urbanization, contributing automatically to economic re-balancing.

… it is estimated that every rural resident who becomes an urban dweller will increase consumption by more than 10,000 yuan (US$1,587). And each one percent increase in the urbanization rate in only one year will see more than 10 million rural residents absorbed into the cities. This will, in turn, translate into consumption totaling more than 100 billion yuan (US$15.9 billion) and correspondingly create more investment opportunities.

Full realization of these opportunities, Li argues, will require reform or abolition of the country’s hukou system of residence registry, with its “urban-rural dual structure.” In other respects, too, vigorous government action is recommended, as long as it achieves “conformity with the objective law of urban development.” (Investigating “the objective law of urban development” is the primary mission of this blog, so it is a concept we shall obsessively return to.)

Core government responsibilities are taken to include the mitigation of social conflicts and problems, infrastructure investment, and administrative intervention to constrain housing-market instability. Urbanization management is thus recognized as a governmental priority. Given the complexity and the global significance of this task, which amounts to the integration of another quarter-billion Chinese into the economic mainstream in a little over a decade, there is really no decent alternative to remarking – with an absolute minimum of smugness or sarcasm – good luck with that.

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Even when direct construction expenditures are ignored, by systematically raising the level of household consumption, Chinese urbanization dominates the country’s macroeconomic landscape. It is no great exaggeration to see the emergence of the world’s most dynamic consumer economy as a side-effect of a three decade-long urbanization process, although – as in any such complex development – the causality is turbular, and self-stimulating.The Chinese consumer is a creature of the new urban epoch, and an incitement to its further elaboration.

As noted in the first part of this post, the centrality of urbanization to China’s macroeconomic predicament has been explicitly addressed in a significant article by China’s new premier, Li Keqiang. The conversion of rural folk into urbanites (or ‘citizens’ according to strict etymology) is accompanied by a 3.6-fold rise in per capita consumption. In addition to the purely quantitative impact upon the level of domestic economic demand, the rise of urban consumers also drives a qualitative transition, characterized above all by the expansion of the service sector (in both absolute and relative terms). Li seeks to align administrative action with this trend:

Escalating the growth of the service industry is critical to adjusting the industrial structure. Effective measures should be taken to build a favorable environment for the growth of the service industry, both in terms of its size and quality. The government should promote the development of production-related service industries such as modern logistics, e-commerce and scientific research and design. It should also ensure that consumption-related services such as tourism, recreation, care of the elderly and domestic services receive a boost, and the development of small and mid-sized service companies gets support.

Urbanization promotes a more service oriented economic structure, which in turn promises to lower the energy-intensity of economic output; raise total factor productivity (TFP); proliferate entrepreneurial small and medium-sized businesses (SMEs); accelerate the emergence of knowledge-based and creative industries; and increase employment opportunities. In other words, a predictable series of dependencies – from urbanization, through consumerism, to service-orientation – subordinates economic policy to “the objective law of urban development” which alone makes its goals realizable. The expansion and improvement of cities will decide whether China works.

The orchestration of central policy questions under an urban theme is also strikingly seen in the area of regional development. Here, too, the country’s most intractable problems are to be unlocked by an urban key:

Regional development is closely related to urbanization. Less-developed regions lag behind in terms of growth, especially in urbanization. In areas which boast mature development conditions and large environmental capacity, the government should actively and steadily facilitate urbanization by reasonable allocation of resources, centralized layout of businesses and encouragement of intensive land usage to fire up new engines of growth and enhance the local capacity for self-sustained development. The government should tailor its regional, industrial and land policies to different regions and sectors, rather than adopting general and all-inclusive policies.

The infrastructural investment and social policy tools that have been employed to ‘Open up the West’ since the turn of the millennium are now specifically envisaged as ways to catalyze, accelerate, and guide urban development in backward regions. Cities are to be the solution.

Some extra links:

Mi Shih’s excellent introduction to chengzhenhua (城镇化) — and why ‘urbanization’ isn’t the right word

For a more hostile take on the Chinese urbanization agenda, see Gordon Chang here.

Nin-Hai Tseng at Fortune: “[Stephen] Roach offers an interesting statistic: China’s services sector requires about 35% more jobs per unit of GDP than do manufacturing and construction.”

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Capital Absorption: On the topic of Michael Pettis, this superb recent article is sure to become an indispensable reference point for China economy watchers. Pettis has long argued that Chinese investment levels exceed the country’s absorption capacity, and the new article places this argument in a broader theoretical framework, which he explains with extraordinary lucidity. If he is correct in his basic assessment, some widely-held assumptions of development economics will require drastic revision, with cultural and institutional factors (“social capital”) acquiring far greater prominence.

Pettis has a deserved reputation for bearishness on Chinese growth prospects, but this article makes a guarded case for optimism in regards to the country’s development strategy, which he sees shifting from an investment-driven growth model to something more institutionally-sensitive. This political sub-forecast predicts significant movement in the direction of market-oriented reform during the Xi-Li period.

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Opening Moves: At the South China Morning Post (via): Premier Li Keqiang fought open opposition from financial regulators in his bid to push through a landmark plan for a free-trade zone in Shanghai. It is the clearest sign yet that the nation’s new leadership is determined to deliver long-delayed economic reforms. […] The new Shanghai free-trade zone plan, officially announced at the beginning of July, is expected to be the testing ground for major policy reforms. It would promote cross-border commodity and capital flows, with key experiments in freeing foreign exchange markets and liberalising domestic interest rates.[…] Within two months, Li made an initial proposal covering 21 initiatives, whose details were not officially announced. These included shortcuts for foreign banks to set up subsidiary or joint venture operations and special permission for foreign commodities exchanges to own warehouses in the free-trade zone in Shanghai … […] … other mainland cities, facing unemployment and slower growth, are also keen to follow Shanghai’s move to lure foreign capital. But Li is not understood to be interested in rushing to copy the Shanghai model for other mainland cities.

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Handle_MZ commented: “it can be confidently anticipated that consumer spending will rise as a function of urbanization, contributing automatically to economic re-balancing.”

I read “The Great Rebalancing” and I think this prediction strangely contradicts Pettis’ main narrative. Pettis says that the consumption share of Chinese GDP is a necessary function of both the populations propensities to save and consume and the whole of Government economic policy to include the PBoC’s interest rates, capital
controls and stabilization of the dollar exchange rate.

The objective is sustainable high GDP growth through high levels of investment, stable wages, and productive factor capital accumulation — especially in the export and tradables sector. A corollary objective is improved global competitiveness in markets farther up the value chain.

If household consumption is a product of means which seek the above end, then any increase in consumption (i.e. from urbanization) that disrupts this end will only be met with compensatory government moves that push
it back down. Policy is the unmoved mover of consumption levels. Well, slightly moved, but by that aforementioned sustainability criterion. But rebalancing cannot occur under the current system unless the
government is wise enough to support it.

And at any rate, urbanization creates a surplus of labor which suppresses the growth rate of average urban wages. The more urban consumption rises (from rising wages, for example), the more attractive it is the move from the
countryside, which also pushes urban wages back down. This helps China’s global competitiveness, but may actually reduce domestic consumption relative to the less-urbanization counterfactual.

Admin response: As you know from previous discussions, there are numerous assumptions that need straightening out before pushing far with this. At this point, I’m satisfied with the conclusion that urbanization is being conceived as a solution to the country’s most pronounced economic quandary (at the highest level of the new leadership). I think this is quite solid, irrespective of the issues that Pettis and you raise. On the latter, though, it seems hard to believe that urbanization is incidental to “social capital” formation, of the kind that — Pettis argues — raises capital absorption capacity, and thus directly contributes to the amelioration of the consumption deficiency problem. That’s in addition to the direct consumption effects emphasized by Li Keqiang.

This isn’t intended as an adequate response to your argument, just a provisional rejoinder.

There’s undoubtedly a Quixotic character to the ‘China should do X’ mode of outside commentary, but Yukon Huang’s short Bloomberg article advising revision of the country’s urbanization policies represents the genre at its best. Noting the agglomeration effects that yield disproportionate returns to urban scale, Huang recommends a turn away from the proliferation of new minor cities, and towards megacity growth.

China is already in a class by itself in accounting for 30 of the 50 largest cities in east Asia. It boasts half a dozen megacities with populations of more than 10 million and 25 “large” cities exceeding 4 million. In fact, though, the only way China will achieve its desired productivity gains is if its leaders allow cities to evolve more organically in response to market forces. They need to let cities like Beijing get bigger.

Urban concentration creates real problems, but these are indistinguishable from the challenges any genuine process of socio-economic advance has to confront. The solutions to these problems will be the same steps that carry the country forward into unexplored territory — beyond ‘catch up’ and into the open horizons of the future. Everything learned from concrete economic history suggests that technological and business opportunity will be ratcheted upwards by exactly those forces which promote megacity agglomeration — and better still urban concentration or intensity — to historically unprecedented levels. That is how — and where — deep social innovation takes place.

Instead of actively trying to spread out growth to small new cities, China’s planners should embrace the agglomeration economies, which militate for larger metropolises. As land and wage costs escalate, some industries will eventually gravitate to medium-size cities, but services will continue to drive expansion in the larger ones. Smart people like to mix with other smart people, and globalization has amplified their financial returns. Beijing and Shanghai have continued to grow because of buoyant higher-value services, even as their manufacturing bases have shrunk. All this explains why in China, productivity in urban areas is more than three times that in rural areas.

But aren’t China’s megacities already too big to be sustainable? As a matter of fact, some urban specialists have concluded that even China’s biggest cities may be too small. They cite “Zipf’s law,” one of the great curiosities of urban research. The law, which is surprisingly accurate for many countries, claims that the biggest city in a country should be about twice the size of the second-biggest, three times the size of the third-biggest, and so forth. On this basis, China’s largest cities appear too small.

Thinking through power laws (such as Zipf’s) dispels the idea of ‘normal’ city sizes. Optimum urban scale is decided by network effects, and is dependent upon the entire social ecology — regionally, nationally, and even globally. The ‘ideal’ size of Shanghai, for instance, cannot be derived from some model of a generic city, but has to be understood, instead, with reference to the singular role this city plays as a hub in multiple networks — especially commercial webs — within which it amasses specialized functions. As these webs expand and thicken, their critical nodes tend to grow and intensify spontaneously. It is natural, therefore, throughout the process of global modernization, for the limits of urban scale to be pushed out ever further, in accordance with the functional sophistication of the system’s crucial hubs, and the associated refinements of specialization these key cities foster.

Beijing is subject to stubborn environmental constraints, with limited water resources prominent among these. Its distance from the coast is also a growth-inhibiting factor. Shanghai, in contrast, is destined to vastness by such implacable historical forces that it is hard to imagine even the most determined policy resistance standing in the way for long. As the country’s commercial capital, any realistic power law distribution of urban scale begins with Shanghai at the summit. It would be best to bend to the inevitable, and let it become the world’s laboratory for urban intensity, tracking the advance of modernity into the Pacific Century. The rewards for this acceptance would easily overwhelm the costs.

In 2012 the global distribution of Internet connectivity still looked strikingly Atlantean:

Two years later, Alissa Walker at Gizmodo asks (rhetorically):

Where is the internet? This map might explain it better than any statistics could ever hope to: The red hot spots show where the most devices that can access the internet are located.

On the new map, too, the Pacific Century has yet to dazzle. It seems that infrastructure — even the most advanced digital infrastructure — incarnates a legacy, rather than virtuality (or potential). By accentuating the Internet-of-Things, the new map has actually dulled the digitization of emerging markets, drawing vision back on a retro-futural path to the historical roots of the modern world order. (The color scheme also tends to under-emphasize the spiky urban-concentrations of the Asian Internet, relative to the more diffuse Euro-American distribution.)

Follow the Gizmodo link for various image options, including alternative Internet visualizations (such as these, and — from the comments — this).

It’s Aesthetics Week @ Social Matter. Here’s the XS twist:

It’s the new Shanghai Tower, in Lujiazui. Latest glistening jewel in a fabulously beautiful city.

It’s a “Green Smart Cultural Vertical City” apparently. (Still a fantastic building, although not much seems to be happening inside yet.)

Here’s the view from the Observation Deck, looking down on it’s closest Shanghai competitor (the Shanghai World Financial Center):

And on number three, the Neo-Deco Jin Mao Tower:

Shenzhen’s birthday is this Wednesday. I’d have put up a 1980 photo, but there wasn’t anything there.

Shenzhen today:

The Wikipedia profile.

The real (paying) job calls. For the last few days of March (and 1st April), I’m going to be ‘away’ on a research trip to Kashgar (Xinjiang). If connectivity isn’t a problem, ‘away’ might not mean much from the perspective of Cyberspace, but I’m expecting at least moderate disruption (most probably exacerbated by colorful ethnic distractions and horrible torrents of baijiu).

If anyone has any Kashgar questions, or information to offer, I’ll do my best to bend my investigations responsively. (I’m not thinking of using this blog as a platform for Xinjiang material, but that’s not a dogmatic commitment, if there’s any interest in the topic.)

[This short Kashgar profile by Ron Gluckman is over a decade old — it will be interesting to see how it has dated.]

ADDED: If the main things you are searching for in life are alcoholic intoxication, coffee, and smooth Internet connectivity, Kashgar cannot — in all honesty — be recommended. On the positive side of the ledger, there’s far more of the Old Kashgar left than first appearance suggests (Otangboyi Road is the place to go, following it past the Idkar Mosque to the night market). The Silk Road commercial culture still thrives, reaching a truly delirious pitch in the Grand Bazaar, which oveflows with sensation-drenching commodities from thousands of kilometers around. The tea is delicious — a spiced up black tea, drunk without milk, but with a distinct hint of Indian chai. Ditto the yoghurt (as thick as cream cheese, with a razor sharp edge), and — of course — everything delectable that can be done with a dead sheep whilst remaining haram.
It’s hard to work out the ethnic balance, but it’s at least predominantly Uyghur (I’ve seen figures between 70-85%). There’s no obvious indications of social tension, with everyone seeming to get on with their lives quite frictionlessly, and no signs that I could pick up of street-level Han paranoia. Han Chinese women navigate the streets alone except for small children, seemingly perfectly relaxed about the social environment, and untroubled by any prospect of violence. Our group (two Han, one Bulgarian, one Brit, and one Uyghur government guide — who is excellent btw) have encountered nothing but friendliness, often combined with impressive efforts to sell us stuff. It has to be said, though, that the government propaganda is shockingly crude.

For example, a note at the Idkah Mosque, after explaining the history of CPC renovation efforts, helpfully explains:

All of it shows fully that Chinese government always pays special attentions to the another and historical cultures of the ethnic groups, and that all ethnic groups warmly welcome Part’s [sic] religious policy. It also shows that different ethnic groups have set up a close relationship of equality, unity and helps to each other, and freedom of beliefs is protected. All ethnic groups live friendly together here. They cooperate to build a beautiful homeland, support heartily the unity of different ethnic groups and the unity of our country, and oppose the ethnic separatism and illegal religious activities.

Perhaps it sounds better in the Uyghur.

Of course, at the end of the day I’m a regime apologist. Afghanistan and Pakistan are right next door, each demonstrating in their own way the wonders of ethno-democratic self-assertion.

Urumqi this time. I’ll fill things out a little when I get a chance (more for my own sake than under any pretence of communication).
That Baijiu holocaust problem I worried needlessly about in Kashgar? Urumqi is a very different city …

ADDED: After arriving yesterday we took in the International Bazaar, a more mall-sructured, and thus rather less atmospheric version of the Kashgar Grand Bazaar, trading similar goods. The most distinctive items were chunks of fossilized wood, so precisely metamorphosed that the minutiae of organic structure were clearly discernible. It’s hard not to be impressed when examining the fine-grained organization of a thing that died 150,000,000 years ago.
Next stop was Hong Shan Park, situated at the north-east edge of the city in 1947, but now enveloped. It’s high, and gives a vantage point from which to get oriented. Better still, the viewing pavilion there also serves as an urban development museum, including scale models (1947 and today), lots of photographs, and basically everything needed for a firm space-time fix. Finally, there was dinner with the local officials — our hosts — which was great fun (even though I’d been horribly sick the day before and still felt shaky). The Baijiu onslaught then unfolded (my travel companion from work turned out to be crazily lihai, and probably saved me by deflecting some of the white death torrent onto herself). Maybe I wrote some scraps fished from the gulfs of shadow? Then oblivion.

Next day: Tarim Mummies, the Urumqi version of Shanghai’s M50 (art hub), and the city’s massive new industrial park called the UETD.
The mummies — dessicated accidentally by the arid environment — are very well known, for good reason. Their state of preservation is incredible — you could still wear their clothes (after almost 4,000 years). The whole anthropo-ethnographic backstory is enthralling too, and I need to try and get my head wrapped around it. The oldest mummies are ‘Europoid’ and really look as if they could have been Cornish. (Scientific consensus, as I understand it tenuously, identifies them as ‘Tokharian’.) This throws the Uyghur-Han ethnic elbowing into disconcerting perspective, but it’s just too out there to be truly politically sensitive (I’m hoping). If the Welsh start claiming chunks of Xinjiang based on ancestral rights I guess that could change. The old mummies come in two pairs, two 3,800-y.o. females, both ‘Europoid’, then a pair from a thousand years later, a Europoid male and a mixed Euro-Mongoloid female. Both of these later mummies are tattooed, and for reasons not yet understood were buried with non-matching boots. Then the exhibition throws in a mummified Han official from AD500, but if you folllow the exhibition around in a disciplined counter-clockwise circuit, there’s no reason to be thrown off by this bizarre and crudely-motivated non sequitur.
The art space had some OK stuff, and reflected the guiding Urumqi attitude: well-meaning, relentlessly multi-cultural, driven by Han, and extremely tame. If you like art that drags you into extra-cosmic abysses of shock and dread, there wasn’t much there to set the pulse racing. Lots of pleasant, (unthreateningly) intelligent, traditional, craft-based stuff though.
The industrial park was really something. Pure China, in the sense that it was mostly a (truly immense) construction site, from which some slender threads of raw potential had tumbled backwards into the present. It already has a population of 270,000, and looked roughly 10% complete. This ‘Park’ — an entire urban district until a few years ago, when it was re-purposed — is programmed to become a glstening science-fiction entity that would over-awe 70%+ of the world’s cities (with most of the remaining 30% being Chinese). We saw a truck plant and the local Coca-Cola operation — full of clattering robotic bottling machinery — and got to ask some questions about the bases of Xinjiang growth. The impression we got is that serving the wider Central Asian market is the cornerstone of everybody’s plans.

ADDED: Six hours on the road and — just to keep things moving forwards smoothly — a two hour visit to a baijiu factory in the middle (plus a lot of other stuff). Two bottles of sample (non-retail maximum strength) rocket fuel in my bag, and four hours sleep to cling onto. Beyond the lesson that Shariah isn’t exactly calling the shots in northern Xinjiang, analysis and reflection is going to be delayed.

Whatever the prejudices you might harbor against Urumqi Internet connections in second rate hotels, they’re probably over-generous. I’ve been effectively de-twitterized by sheer technological crappitude rather than anything more sinister, but this channel seems to be (barely) OK. (Annoyingly, they provide a computer in the room, which locks everything into chronic dysfunction.) So apologies for the deteriorated state of communications over the next few days.

The main objective of this trip is to explore Xinjiang’s Buddhist heritage, which is so vast and rich that even some superficial scratching should turn up some interesting stuff. The main current of Buddhist influence into China passed this way, hybridizing wildly with other cultures in one of the world’s great mixing zones. After arriving off the steps, the Uyghurs were Buddhist for centuries, before Islam got a grip around the turning point of the first millennium (I’ll try to fill in some dates with greater precision later on).

Updates as events, energy, and time permit.

ADDED: Scheduled to arrive at the site of interest tomorrow. Up to now, it’s been a mix of some interesting stuff (but probably not Outside in material — weird Uyghur dances with cups of water balanced on heads? I didn’t think so), Internet nightmare (Twitter inaccessible again), and grand finale: the mandatory baijiu-crazed ‘austere-enough-for government-work’ welcoming banquet. The inebriated babble effect is no doubt obvious. We saw some astounding Tianshan vistas too (‘Tianshan Grand Canyon’ — don’t be put off by the ridiculous name), but I’m hopeless at natural wonder, so I won’t even try to communicate it.

We’re in Baicheng now. I’ll be impressed if anyone’s heard of it, bt it seems shockingly well-governed, and probably the most attractive modern city in Xinjiang. For us, it’s just the gateway out to the Buddha caves, but it’s been an interesting surprise. It’s prosperous — due to petrochemicals — well-designed, seems highly livable, and it’s partnered with Wenzhou (which you should have heard of), a relationship that has been very effectively milked.

Our hotel is a beautiful Jiangnan-style place, which also came as a serious shock. We’d expected we were on the way down from the Urumuqi quarters to something seriously dire, but instead find ourselves in one of the nicest hotels in Xinjiang — and that does actually mean really nice. Still no reliable Internet connectivity though (by which I mean the opportunity to run my VPN), so the twitter shakes are getting bad. [If Spandrell’s out there — I’m not hiding from your ruthless tweet-fu logic, my tongue’s been cut out.]

Over the next few days I’ll be in Guizhou, known for its karst landscapes, insanely spicy food, and comparative poverty. The computer is coming — but so are the kids, so blogging is likely to be erratic at best. It’s going to be a test of my Outside in addiction, and one that I’m already failing … digit tremors and threads of mild delirium are creeping in, and I haven’t left the house (or keyboard) yet.

ADDED: As Spandrell points out in the comments, ethnic complexity should have been added to the list of main Guizhou promotion points. There are a whole bunch of ‘minorities’ here, of whom the Miao are probably the best known, and exotic ‘tribal’ clothing (especially impractically-ornate head-dresses) are easy to spot even in the metropolis — more as attractions in shops and restaurants than on the street. The tribals are obviously little folk, giving the province a land-of-the-pixies feel. We’ve yet to see any foreigners here.

We’re still in Guiyang, the provincial capital, which might be the smallest Chinese city we’ve ever seen — just 1.2 million according to our (highly untrustworthy) guidebook. I pretty much always like Chinese cities, and this one — whilst definitely odd — is no exception. The architecture is only tenuously sane, consisting in large part of highly eclectic experiments in variants of hybrid Chinese modernism, or an oneiric re-visitation of global architectural history spliced with Chinese characteristics. Unconvincingly restored Ming complexes co-exist with space-ship roofed towers and grandiose domed edifices from an imagined 1920s. They’re doing something ambitious with the river, but it’s hard to quite tell what.

We spent the morning at Qianling Park, right at the edge of the city, and an amazing place to visit. Forested misty hills, covered in obscure Buddhist carvings, with the province’s largest temple at the top. Thousands of monkeys populate the park, and even though some of these now form a welfare-dependent semi-criminal underclass, they were still the best-behaved wild simians we’ve yet encountered — fearless, dignified, entertaining, and pacific. (There was no sign of the ‘heavy begging’ we’ve encountered among macaques elsewhere in China — let alone among the terrifying monkey gangs in India — and I’m putting that down to the Buddhist influence.)

ADDED: Anshun, the gateway into central Guizhou, is a scruffy town of roughly 400,000. Our hotel — The Triumphal (seriously) — was supposedly a 4-star, everything about it was vaguely dysfunctional, and the Chintz aesthetics were like needles in the eyeballs. (The room included its own Internet-connected computer, which meant that both the machine and the connection were scarcely endurable.)

Once out into the scenic areas (no easy task), the squalor and hassle was thoroughly redeemed. We were ‘doing’ geology rather than ethnography, so the main cultural stimulus was provided by Miao grannies selling cucumbers and boiled eggs to the tourists (all Chinese, as far as we could tell). The area around Huangguoshu — where a new city has been built on (tourist industry) spec. — is dominated by vast, rugged, karst tracts: canyons, caverns, sculpted mountain-pillars, and brutally-sliced cliffs, cross-cut by innumerable waterways and small lakes. It’s truly stunning.

A high point for us was passing behind the Huangguoshu Great Waterfall (Dapubu), climbing through a series of winding limestone caves that broke out intermittently into open ledges, in front of which the largest waterfall in Asia deluged downwards thunderously. We’d already explored the mind-melting Tianxing area earlier in the day [insert karst landscape superlatives here] and were bouncing against the outer limits of stimulation absorption.

Philosophical stimulation? One curiosity of special note (at Tianxing) had the English label ‘The Root of the Human Race’ — it was indeed a root, of some old, tough rock-clinging creeper, but it only really made sense in Chinese, because “Human Race” translated the character ‘ren’ (very roughly an inverted ‘V’), and what was being described was a rising cascade of converging connections. The ‘ren’ ideogram is sometimes explained as an image of convergence, so the Tianxing root was radicalizing [sic] a pre-existing conception, but one that blatantly contradicts the dominant image of human ancestry — whether Darwinian or Biblical — as a ‘tree’ diverging from a single root. It has the potential to be upsetting in all kinds of ways, so I’ve reserved this creeper a stretch of undistracted attention sometime soon …

Latest travel distraction is the world capital of the technocommercialists. Of course, it’s a city that I adore to the edge of brain-stem seizure. Just seeing the Kowloon container port is almost enough to persuade one that the process on this planet is actually going OK.

Naively, I had expected that Mandarin would have made some obvious inroads since the last time I was here (roughly six years ago). No sign of that, though. It’s quite stunning how much English there is here, and the extent to which English remains the default alternative to Cantonese. That has to have important implications in respect to the cultural foundations of Hong Kong autonomy.

Expeditionary inertialization due to exhausted children prevented exploration getting off the ground today. Nothing too adventurous is likely to happen, but I’ll try to record a few sporadic notes here. Hong Kong is an iconic city, with an exceptional intensity of sociopolitical meaning,  so it should be possible to discuss — and even argue about — it.

I’m only here (with family) for a few days, then returning to Shanghai for six weeks of solitary, extremely high-intensity production. After Thursday, if anybody has extravagant demands to make, it’s the time to make them. Whatever is ever going to be possible should be possible soon. Most likely, I’ll learn some crushing lessons about project feasibility, because all my excuses will be gone.

ADDED: Hong Kong has to be a critically important example for the development of the sovereignty discussion. It’s almost certainly the freest society in the world, whilst quite clearly under the sovereignty of a nation that, even to its its most ardent defenders, equally certainly isn’t. Perhaps this doesn’t rise to the level of a paradox. After all, up until 1997, when it served (retrospectively) as a crucial case of the neoreactionary thesis — distinguishing liberty and democracy with extreme clarity — the structure was not altogether different. Even then, the colonial metropolis was evidently pitched at a far lower level of liberty than its comparatively small, powerless, and insultingly disposable possession. Given the international image of the PRC, however, it would surely be hard to argue that the peculiarity had not been exacerbated.

In Hong Kong, the PRC ‘oversees’  an outpost that operates as a zone of uninhibited reflection upon its ideologically hyper-sensitive motherland. There are many ways to explore this. It connects with the larger issue of Cantonese ethnic self-consciousness —  a topic of truly immense significance for China’s medium-term future. It has important academic and media dimensions. It also shapes the concrete reality of China’s engagement with the world, especially in its most ‘deterritorialized’  or cosmo-capitalist dimension.

On this trip, the area which brought it most into focus was the visual arts. Most particularly, a fascinating exhibition at the Asia Society Hong Kong Center called Light before Dawn: Unofficial Chinese Art 1974-1985. This show covered material that might have been found in Shanghai today, except what would have been explored approximately, cautiously, and with nervous cunning in Shanghai, was brought together brazenly and (for anyone habituated to mainland cultural norms) provocatively in Kong Kong. The message of the exhibition was stark: Socialist Realism was benighted, and the cultural escape from the command economy era was a liberation from totalitarian night. The three decades from 1949-79 were a horror story, from which China has been released. It scarcely needs to be said that this is not a narrative in conformity with the ‘official’ PRC storyline of Reform and Opening, and its historical meaning.

Setting aside the details of the show, for the moment, the questions it raises concern Hong Kong, China, sovereignty, and cultural autonomy. Does China surreptitiously appreciate this offshore zone of critical leverage? Does it merely tolerate Hong Kong’s role as gadfly, due to the preeminence of other factors, and interests? (Chinese mainland capitalism clearly makes massive use of the ‘One Country Two Systems’ arrangement, in many different ways.) How functional is a peripheral zone of exorbitant freedom, considered abstractly, as an appendage to large-scale authoritarian social structures in general? Could this be the way that a rational apparatus of power realistically discriminates, eagerly seizing upon an invaluable exemption from impractical universalism? That is what Outside in suspects.

My Vietnam is like my China: accessed from the South, from the mega-urban, commercial culture, and from pre-communist traditions. It’s very much the view from Saigon (and that isn’t something I regret). Saigon would be a great place to live (in small part because the idea of calling it Ho Chi Minh City is a transparent joke).

Doi Moi looks like it should work a lot like Gaige Kaifeng (as a local version of generic ‘Reform and Opening’ in a ‘Market Leninist’ regime) — but it doesn’t seem to be quite working out. If rationalized corruptocracy is close to ideal limit of effective government among large states, Vietnam seems to have managed the corruptocracy far better than the rationalization. Infrastructure development — the magic sauce of recent Chinese hyper-growth — has not reached ignition. The country is too small to fund its own ambitions, and too chaotically kleptocratic to bring in foreign investment on the scale required. Despite many excellent things going for it, the country is floundering with a morose economic spirit that is almost Western.

Vietnamese coffee is among the most sublime offerings this tortured planet supplies. Thick, dark, and massively caffeinated, it makes a Starbucks brew seem like dishwater. One cup and the flight has paid for itself, as far as the utilitarian calculus is concerned.

A visit to Saigon’s fine arts museum is a grave disappointment. The building is a beautiful colonial structure, but the contents — once despicable trash had been ceremoniously burned — would fill a small room. There’s no way Vietnam will be setting the world art market on fire in the immediate future.

Cao Dai is very strange. Created as a new religion in 1926, with the obvious brief to make spiritual sense of Vietnam’s peculiar position with cultural history and geography, it canonized Victor Hugo and Sun Yat-sen as signatories of “the third alliance between God and man” (after Moses and Jesus). Cao Dai’s Masonic founder, Nguyen Gia Tri, rounded out the new sacred triumvirate.

“I saw an eye” was the way my seven-year-old daughter recorded her experience of the main Cao Dai temple. That would be the Sauronic Cosmic Eye, repeated obsessively as a motif, overlooking the white-robed devotees during their observances. The quantity of lurid symbolism is quite overwhelming. For anybody with the slightest attachment to a restrained religious tradition, the effect would be one of unbridled spiritual chaos. Apparently good natured, and seriously interesting, though.

Vietnamese water puppet theater — more engaging than I had expected.

[Typing on this device is killing me — I’m heading out into the fragrant tropical night for a cigarette.]

Siem Reap (Cambodia) is a scruffily exotic town that never threatens to over-stretch the adjective bank. For anyone who has been out of the tropics for a while, it’s charming enough, and the locals are pleasant, dignified folk. Our hotel, with its hints of French colonial heritage and lush foliage is more than OK (as long as you don’t make the mistake of testing their catering capabilities). Siem Reap, however, is just a jump-off point.

The Angkor sites, in contrast, incinerate all available positive adjectives within seconds, threatening speechlessness. It’s absolutely necessary to assume a front-rank wonders-of-the-world baseline in what follows, with awe-struck mind-melt accepted as the default perceptual mode (in the absence of, and in addition to, any explicit qualification). There might be more stunning spectacles to be found on this earth, but that would require a serious argument.

The Angkor temples were constructed over a period of 630 years, reaching a climactic golden age of architectural production in the 14th and early 15th centuries. Go read a history book (I still need to).

Angkor Thom is an entire temple city, with large tracts of rain forest within its walls, and a moat of lake-like scale without. One architectural feature well worth noting at an early stage follows from the fact that the Khmers never mastered the arch, so their internal spaces have a massy, geological character, often rising to impressive heights, but without culminating vaults. Technically, therefore, it is a kind of anti-gothic, ascending through sheer mountainous upsurge of stacked stone, rather than gravity-defying structure. It is if the earth were imperiously commanded to soar, without the slightest hint of sublimation into anything other than itself. These are fabulously sculpted artificial mountains — sacred mesas. According to my guidebook, there are 11,000 carved figures and 1.2km of bas reliefs on the Bayon — the core of Angkor Thom. These carvings were detailed to the level of fine textile design on the skirts of miniature dancers, while including giant enigmatic faces several meters across (and in great number).

Angkor Wat is not only a monumental aesthetic composition, but also an enthralling philosophical puzzle. As befits the final days of the snake year, it is a symbolic complex strung together by nagas. These seven-headed serpent monsters are arrayed around the site as guardians, rearing up from the end of every balustrade. They also figure prominently on the series of huge, continuous bas reliefs that wrap the main structure, and — truly provocatively — provide hoods for numerous Buddha statues throughout the site. (Angkor Wat is thought to be devoted primarily to Vishnu, with Buddhism present as a later arrival.) This hissing religious insidiousness needs futher attention at a future point.

Click image to enlarge.

(Five-headed nagas are atypical — this one was found at Ta Prohm.)

The third prominent naga moment occurs on the most revered of the bas reliefs, which depicts the ‘stirring of the ocean of milk’. A quick step back first …

Viewed panoramically, Angkor Wat epitomizes timeless serenity. Close examination of its narrative carvings, however, reveals an obsession with war. Armies clash, and parade, on earth and in the heavens. Even the torments of the underworld have the character of military atrocity — stabbings, slashings, and impalings. The cosmos depicted tends to a slaughterhouse.

It is here that the naga key can be inserted. The stirring of the ocean of milk (the Milky Way?) is a tug-of-war between gods and demons — a cosmic war, therefore, whose thread is the vast naga Vasuki, whose body is stretched across a hundred meters (?) of delicately-carved display space. Crucially, a central pivot, consisting of Mount Mandala resting upon the body of Vishnu in turtle-form, converts this conflictual back-and-forth into rotary dynamism — appropriating war to a celestial function …

Click image to enlarge.

ADDED: The third temple in the core of the Angkor complex is Ta Prohm. For sheeraesthetic rapture, it might be the most stunning. (I’m going to add some snaps as soon as bandwidth considerations allow that.)

Ta Prohm has been shattered and devoured by the jungle, with broken masonry fused (at once beautifully and hideously) with monstrous trees. It thus vividly presents a hard collision between culture and nature in the starkest possible terms. The trees conducting the slow-motion assault are known locally as ‘spung’ (botanically: tetramelesnudiflora). No director could have chosen better assailants than these behemoths, with massive, twisting roots. It was obvious from this spectacle that trees do tentacle horror even more impressively than cephalopods, if allowance is made for the inhuman time factor.

An almost equally superb example of semi-digested cyclopean civilization is found at Beng Mealea, a two-hour tuk tuk ride away, through jungle-fringe countryside. The heritage preservation problems of intervening in this titanic clash are fascinating to contemplate. How does one appropriately restore — or merely save — an intricately-carved shrine half-eaten by a colossal tree? Is a formula even imaginable?

The Angkor remains tend to overwhelm the experience of the country — probably as the pharonic remains of ancient Egypt do there. The better half raised some thought-provoking points about the situation. A regime based on god-king sovereignty, caste, and war — hardcore even by the wildest imaginings of contemporary reactionaries, therefore (and with no hint of ‘neo-’ in sight) — created a legacy that continues to support the country six centuries after the collapse of the Khmer kingdom. How does this affect calculations of social order, economics, and time? It certainly inclines the mind toward illiberal musings.

***

Cambodian money is a study in the contemporary world order. In Siem Reap, especially, the economy is fully dollarized. The local currency, the Riel, is worth USD0.00025, and we never came across a note worth more than 25 cents until leaving SR. Riels were used as change (compensating for the absence of US specie). Seignorage bitchez. Everyone says it doesn’t amount to much in aggregate, but the symbolism is certainly something.

In Kampot, we threw a chunk of the local economy into chaos trying to break a 10 dollar bill. The first group of street traders we approached had no idea whar it was (might as well have been some kind of arcane futures contract). It was only when we got into the center of town that ‘money’ and ‘small change’ became differentiable concepts?

***

The whole ‘Khmer Rouge accelerated dysgenics’ idea makes a lot of sense, conceptually, but the locals seem competent enough on the evidence provided by casual exposure. Given where the country has been, it seems to be doing OK.

The second HBDish (or as we say ‘Spandrellish’) point raised in respect to the Vietnamese was ‘tropical work habits’ — I’ll plead agnosticism, while reluctantly noting that Siem Reap contained the first “6-11s” I’ve ever seen …

***

Cambodian politics? Not much new information really, except (1) the state of media openness seems quite high (for better and for worse, given the chronic Cathedralism of the contemporary journalistic mind), and (2) the pervasive promotion of the Cambodian People’s Party is recognizably ‘communist’ in its indifference to the pseudo-binary balance recognized by friend and foe alike as the hegemonic global norm. Going out on a limb, I’d hazard that the country is doing well by effectively suppressing anything beyond nominal democracy, but the pressure to deteriorate will only get worse.

***

Being disconnected in stages is a new experience. All connectivity disappeared at 9pm last night (or so) — it wasn’t something I appreciated. Satellite-linked neuro-embedded chip? Yes please.

***

Conversations with a Tuk Tuk Driver #1 (Democracy):

Us: “So who did you support in the last election?’
TTD: “I voted for Sam Rainsy.”
US: “What did you like about him?”
TTD: “He promised to spend more money on things. Hun Sen is spending a lot of money, but Sam Rainsy said he would spend even more money.”

Conversations with a Tuk Tuk Driver #2 (Colonialism):

Us: “This place [a pepper farm] is great. [Joking, to kids] Would you like to become Cambodian pepper farmers?”
TTD [jumping in]: “Easy. There’s a lot right next door available for US$6,000. Enough space to grow pepper, mangoes, papaya, bananas, keep some chickens, some cows — that’s really good money, cows.”
Us: “It sounds like a lot of work.”
TTD: “No problem! Cambodian people would do all the work. You could just lie in hammocks, telling them what to do. They’d do all the farming, ask if you want something to eat, bring you drinks …”

[more later]

The Mogao Caves are located in a harsh place. (Click on images to enlarge.)

The caves shown are in the northern cluster, whose exterior features have not been defaced by reinforced concrete. The southern group has been externally ruined by Zhou Enlai (although he seems to have meant well), but its interiors are the great treasures of the site, and some are open to the public, by guided tour. Some images of southern cave interiors (reconstructions) to follow.

Photography is forbidden in the Dunhuang grottoes, and under the close supervision of the mandatory tour, this prohibition is strictly enforced. Photography is also forbidden in the adjacent Mogaoku Museum …

The spine of the museum consists of a row of (extremely impressive) cave reconstructions, sampled from among the 492 decorated caves at the site. (A two-hour tour of the site takes in perhaps 10.)

The following images are of reconstructions, not originals. The photographic quality is especially dire, given the unusual lighting conditions and cramped space. What I’m posting here is what I’ve got. (Click on images to expand.)

Cave 003:

Cave 217 (one of the most renowned caves, whose images — disputedly — convey scenes and stories from the Lotus Sutra):

Cave 275:

Cave 419:

Unplugged in Gulang Yu (involuntarily). Normal service to be resumed ASAP. Here‘s some soft jungle to be going on with.

… Damn, POS pseudo-connection can‘t even manage that.

(Have they hung Bryce yet?)

ADDED: Looks like it’s possible (finally) to put up a few tropical retreat snaps (and seems like they’re clickable):

(I can’t get enough of this arborohorror.) One more:

ADDED: The two posts that have made all this (‘Trannygate’) craziness worthwhile —

(1) Nyan Sandwich at More Right “… is Neoreaction a heretical political-insight-seeking movement, or a right-wing activist movement?”

(2) Nick B Steves on the Official Neoreactionary Position (endorsed by the most right-wing person on the Internet).

The new airport doesn’t by any means say it all, but it says a lot:

If it were not that ‘modernity’ (also) connoted friction and nostalgia, would there be any hesitation in describing Shenzhen as the most modern city in the world? It is nothing beyond what the opportunities of the present era have enabled it to be — a uniquely unambiguous urban seizure of the global now. (Urban Future adores this place to the edge of neurological catastrophe.)

[Disjointed commentary to be added as the opportunity arises]

Huaqiang Bei — Chips with everything:

Shenzhen, and Huaqiang Bei in particular, places absolutely unapologetic euphoric commoditization on display. This is the world’s Gizmoverse.

No one can have even the faintest idea how massively electronic production differentiates into lineages, species, sub-species, and minutely subtle varieties, until they wander through these markets. Combining innovative variation, replication at mind-melting scales, and fierce commercial selection (expressed through adaptive minutiae of product specification and price), the ecological analogy — based on fabulously complex networks of competition and cooperation — is irresistible. The electronic jungle is open to exploration.

Each product line opens niches for others. Not only are there dazzling multitudes of mobile phone types — an entire phylum now, honing classical forms, and branching off chaotically down lines of mutation — but also symbiotc industries for phone cases (“protective shells”), stands, re-chargers, input and output accessories, cables and connectors, each assertively seizing its patches of commercial display space.

The Huaqiang Bei outlets are described as ‘factory shops’ — sheer industrial exuberance jutting into exchange space. As an indicator, bulk discounts are the norm. Buy a single gizmo of any kind and the deal is met with the friendly but puzzled question: “Only one piece?” Racks of Cyberspace candy tilt towards rapid circulatory flow.

More (always massively more) on a descent into the commoditronic core of intensive modernity:

(There are other aspects to Shenzhen than turbular emergent machine-mind markets, and they deserve a chilled Shenzhen post. Then, some deeper engagement with the seething interior of Darwinized social logistics, competitive supply, or the Commoditronic Thing.)

… Shenzhen fragments (from the world’s tech-comm paradise).

Sucking up to the specter of Sino-Capitalism:

Ironically, my connectivity here is so bad it’s driving me out of my mind, so this is arriving in pieces …

Our hotel is in Huaqiang Bei, the center of the Shenzhen electronic market zone. The area is packed with emporia, which are in turn packed with products — and more specifically commodities. Rather than masking the traits of commercial mass-production under a veneer of ’boutique’ rarity, the Shenzhen spirit is most gloriously manifested in the naked exhibition of hyper-alienated, techno-proliferated, trade-format volumes. Chips (of all kinds) come in sheets, which are then stacked into piles, and tessalated into display places designed to minutely explore minimal differences (product micro-specifications and volume-linked price slices). This is capitalism. It’s easy — in a decline-phase Westernized world — to forget what it looks like.

Cables:

Skynet embryo chips in the Huitong Professional Security Market:

The drone market is only just getting started (at least, we didn’t see any stacks):

Fragments from the West Coast, plus some bits and pieces.

Currently in a gothic inspiration — the Otira Hotel — just beyond Arthur’s Pass. Bought for one million dollars, along with the whole village of forty houses. It’s on the rail-line, but remained on the market for years because:
1) It’s a Gold Rush ghost town with no economic base
2) It’s deep in a valley that plunges it into permanent shadow for half the year
3) There’s a massive quake due (on the fault-line it straddles) which is expected to destroy everything
The new owners have stuffed the hotel bar with Gold Rush antiques, taxidermy specimens, the first telegraph cable, freaky life-size marionettes … it should be getting dark for the full effect (but it isn’t yet) …

On an Internet ration tonight (Dec. 27.), but I’m going to try to keep this alive — meaning updates undramatized by an ‘ADDED’. Also pics (but some slight time lag likely there).

The NZ west coast is dominated by a near-continuous strip of temperate rain forest, blurring into sub-tropical rain forest in the north. The peculiar local vegetation, including numerous species of giant ferns, give the landscape a prehistoric flavor. It’s also extremely rugged, with the western slopes of the NZ alps cascading right down to the coast. The sea is brutal, and the coastline deeply mauled. The early exploration of this area was tough. It’s conspicuously Gnon-tinged geography. (Patience needed on the pix front, apologies.)

Only 30,000 people live on the west coast of the South Island — and most of them are trying with greater or lesser urgency to leave. The landscape is glorious (the British Columbia comparison is inescapable). Once drone logistics make it viable to survive in web-linked isolation in this area, it’s going to make a spectacular refuge. For the moment, it’s populated by hippies, hill-billies, and extraction-industry social detritus (a great horror fiction mix, however — drugs, guns, and expendables).

Finally — NZ West Coast pics (via the better half).

No one really denies that Singapore is the most functional society on earth, which is interesting in itself. Everything works here (even multiculturalism (of which they have the superior Confucian hegemony version, rather than the ethno-masochistic late-Christian fiasco)). Practical civilization reaches its zenith in the orchid zone of the Singapore botanic gardens, or somewhere close to it. This drives a lot of people — even those who profoundly admire the place — into a sulfurous rage.

No one likes an apple-polisher of Gnon (or scarcely anyone, I’m exempting myself, along with a few others). By demonstrating social functionality, Singapore makes everyone look bad, which doesn’t go down well. The Sings make us all look like useless scum. Yes, there is that.

Conversation snippets:

“How much crime is there in Singapore?”
“Not much. I saw a sign saying ‘Warning! Five bicycles have been stolen from this area in the last three years.’ People were leaving them there unlocked.”

“I’ve known a lot of Singaporeans, but I’ve never really had a Singaporean friend. … If you’re used to going out on a Friday night, getting hammered, and waking up in the morning feeling like crap, it’s hard. No one does that here. The Singaporeans are sensible all the freaking time …”

The stairwell door to the apartment where we’re staying has a biometric identification system (plus two redundant human security guards).

The demographic problem — I’m increasingly convinced — is hugely about education costs (in money and time). It’s k-selection catastrophe. That’s a can to be kicked down the road for the time being, though, because no one has a solid solution to offer right now. Mentioned here because it’s deep, highly general, and the only criticism of Singapore that deserves to be taken remotely seriously.

3.5 million citizens, and 1.5 million permanent residents. (‘PRs’ are obligated to do national military service.)

I’ll try to update this further (and if I was Singaporean I’d almost certainly deliver).

Huangshan — It isn’t K2 (but then I’d never be idiotic enough to try scaling K2.)

Arrived in Hanoi a few hours ago (first time in the northern part of Vietnam). Will be here a couple of days, then down south to Hoi An, and Hue. I’ll try to ad some notes pics, in stages.

One less than massively-inspired snap so far, of the Hanoi Old Quarter, (near our hotel):

Anyone with a particular desire to know that I’m nodding along in glum agreement can feel free to tell me its one of the most execrable pieces of photographic garbage to yet soil the terrestrial infosphere. Hoping, in inadequate excuse, that it gives some vague hint of the local atmosphere. Will try to up my game to a more ordinary level of sub-mediocrity in the days ahead.

(Organization this time should be up to a reasonably competent Chaos Patch tomorrow.) A

ADDED: At the shrine of the Long Do God, heaps of ‘Choco-Pops’ packets and a pyramid of canned beers offered solemnly in sacrifice.

Barry Crump is seen as capturing the edge of the place. There’s a recent movie based on one of his books (recommended for the Outer-Anglosphere cultural flavour).

There’s also a route to Samuel Butler, through the back country.

The outlaw myth is far more integral to the Anglo culture than much of NRx can easily be happy about. Everyone is going to sympathise with the runaways, not with the search party.

Some (real) advice from the bush: “Keep moving or you’ll be eaten.” (Deeper than it was meant to be at the time.)

Posted from Tokyo, first time in Japan, which is awesome so far. An open society without being stupid about it would be the NRx fast-summary (sound, but limited). It was vastly easier to get into Japan than the United States.

Staying in the AirB&B equivalent of a coffin-hotel, but the situation is good (in Ueno).

Civilization level meets high expectations, and friendliness level exceeds them.
Much more English signage than expected, and the inherited Chinese characters have preserved their meanings, if not their phonological values, so the urban landscape is surprisingly intelligible.
Micro-artisan businesses of extreme excellence, typically run by elderly people, are everywhere.
Automation dialed up to eleven.
Yet to see a single over-weight person (which out-performs the stereotype).

Ginza: